1

OKOYE CHUKA. A.

PG/PhD/08/49388

PG/M. Sc/09/51723

THE EVALUATION OF HEIDEGGER’S ONTOLOGICAL DECONSTRUCTION.

PHILOSOPHY

A THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY, FACULTY OF

SOCIAL SCIENCES, UNIVERSITY OF NIGERIA, NSUKKA

Webmaster

Digitally Signed by Webmaster’s Name

DN : CN = Webmaster’s name O= University of Nigeria, Nsukka

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FEBRUARY,2011

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UNIVERSITY OF NIGERIA NSUKKA

FACULTY OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES

DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY

TOPIC

THE EVALUATION OF HEIDEGGER’S ONTOLOGICAL DECONSTRUCTION.

BY

OKOYE CHUKA. A.

PG/PhD/08/49388

PROF. B.O. EBOH

SUPERVISOR

FEBRUARY, 2011

APPROVAL

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This thesis has been approved for the Department of Philosophy, University

of Nigeria, Nsukka for the award of Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D) degree in

Metaphysics.

_______________ _________________

Supervisor Internal Examiner

________________ _________________

Head of Department External Examiner

CERTIFICATION

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Okoye, Chuka A. a Doctor of Philosophy candidate of the Department of

Philosophy University of Nigeria, Nsukka (PG/PhD/08/49388) has

satisfactorily completed the requirements for the award of Doctor of

Philosophy degree (PhD) in Metaphysics.

This thesis is original and has not been submitted in part of full for any other

degree in this or any other university.

________________ ________________

Candidate Supervisor

___________________

Head of Department

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HIS WORK IS DEDICATED TO MY PARENTS SIR TONY AND PROF. TINA OKOYE, IN

APPRECIATION AND ADMIRATION.

Acknowledgements

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The beginning of success is measured not only by the effort one puts up but also

by the record of the many people who contribute to the history of one’s success. In this

PhD program, some people have contributed to the history of its success. Some of who

are mentioned here.

In the First place, I am grateful to the almighty God whose blessings, favor and

grace carried me through this program. I appreciate with a devoted heart the role of our

Blessed mother the Blessed Virgin Mary through out this work.

To my dearest Supervisor and Father, Rev. Fr. Prof. B.O. Eboh, whose

understanding and gentle but stern corrections saw to the success of this work, I say thank

you. I appreciate equally the motivation given to me by Prof. Egbeke Aja – my mentor,

the Head of Department Dr. F.O.C. Njoku and my friends in the department: Dr.

Anyaehie, Dr. Barr. Omeh, Dr. Areji, Dr. Eneh, Dr. Chukwuelobe, and Rev. Chukwuma;

and all the lecturers in the department.

I can never forget my parents Sir Tony Okoye and Prof. Tina Okoye for their care

and support during this program. My thanks extend to my brothers Dr. Chudi and Mr.

Chiedu Okoye; and my darling sister Chinwe for the challenges and support during these

years of studies. I am also grateful to my dear cousin Mr. Chijioke V. Okpala for his

friendship and company.

To my dearest friends, Christian Amogu (Fr.), Jerome Obiorah (Sr.), Ebi Eze,

Emeka Onwuama, Emmanuel Ibuot, Echezona (Okoye) Ezeanya, Ngozi Okehi, and Stan,

I say hearty thanks for your prayers and support.

-OKOYE CHUKA A.-

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Table of Content

Title page ………………………………………………………….i

Approval page…………………………………………………..ii

Certification………………………………………………………iii

Dedication…………………………………………………………..iv

Acknowledgements……………………………………………….v

Abstract……………………………………………………………….vi

CHAPTER ONE

General Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Statement of the Problem. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .5

Purpose of the study. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .6

Scope of the study. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

Significance of the study. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

Methodology. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .7

Chapter Two

Literature Review. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .10

CHAPTER THREE

Analysis Of The Ontological Deconstruction

The Biography of Heidegger……………………………………42

Heidegger and Dasein Analytic. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .44

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Heidegger and Phenomenological Method. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .48

The Dasein and Existence. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .54

The Dasein and Temporality…………………………………….66

Heidegger on Hegel’s Timeness. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .74

Chapter four

Evaluation of Heidegger’s Ontological Deconstruction

Deconstruction and the question of Method………………….79

Tracing the phenomenology of Death…………………………89

Ontological Deconstruction and Existentialism……………….101

CHAPTER FIVE

Re- evaluation

Summary…………………………………………………………..110

Ontological Deconstruction in Religion and Ethics……………120

Dasein and Personal Identical……………………………………124

Conclusion…………………………………………………………126

Bibliography……………………………………………………….129

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Abstract

The question of being which is very ambiguous in its application and roll leads the field

of metaphysics into some unclear grounds. Metaphysics appears so transcendental and

dogmatic that the issues that surround it appear very confusing. Heidegger in the 20th

century believes strongly that the problem here is not just with the discipline but with the

way it has been handled over the years by the metaphysicians. He accused these

predecessors of the forgetfulness of being which has so far led to the problem of

metaphysics. This forgetful of being is to be tackled when one studies being in relation to

time. This work evaluates Heidegger’s position with an objective of seeing how realistic

his position is and how successfully this idea is going to impact on metaphysics.

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CHAPTER ONE

General Introduction

1.1 Background of the Study:

The history of philosophy from the ancient times has been battling with what exactly the

scope of metaphysics is. This very problem arose from against the understanding that

metaphysics is one of the most important branches of philosophy. However, the divisions of

metaphysics into two sub- branches, namely: cosmology and ontology goes a long way to show

that the very scope of ‘metaphysics’ covers both physical and the non- physical grounds. But it

appears that the very etymology of metaphysics as that which is ‘beyond the physics’ has

engendered many reactions by philosophers of various epochs. During the ancient period, people

held passionately to transcendental dictates and terms, an act which is believed rendered

philosophy enigmatic and disinteresting in the later epochs. Philosophers like Anaximander saw a

mysterious origin of the universe in the infinite boundless. For him, the world came as a result of

a separating off from the vortex motion of the universe1. This infinite boundless actually

represented a hardly comprehensible or, better still, a transcendental origin and sustenance of the

universe. This super-expression of metaphysics found its way into the later philosophy of Plato

and Aristotle who tried to create today what we call the classical metaphysics.

In the thought of Plato and Aristotle, metaphysics was seen as an adventure into the

world beyond the sensory perception. Evidently, they believed that metaphysics asks the question

of universals and other non-phenomenal realities. Somehow these philosophers made the

philosophical world to believe that reality comprised sensory and non-physical natures. But how

far these two natures co-operate in making the spatio-temporal world real is a puzzle and indeed a

point of departure for the great friends of old- Plato and Aristotle. Worthy of note, however, is

that their seeming polemics never suggested diversity of thought but a re-iteration of the same

concepts in different parlance using different measures. This quasi split between the philosophies

of these classical thinkers still continued down to the medieval period when a need arose for

asking the question of the nature of reality again. At this time there arose a need to identify an

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absolute transcendence, a quest which was heralded by the two classical philosophers; Plato and

Aristotle. This absolute transcendent was God.

The Godhead became for the medieval philosophers the metaphysics of metaphysics and

since ontology is the heart of metaphysics, God became also Being of beings. The problem of

being in the medieval period rendered metaphysics purely religious and abstract. Philosophers of

the epoch saw the need to see God in everything, defend God at all cost and build everything

around Him. Hence, metaphysics at that time entailed the discourse about the Trinitarian God.

This theological philosophy which reared its head into medieval philosophizing extended to the

time of the schoolmen. The schoolmen became more interested in the interpretation of the

Christianized works of the ancient philosophers who still orchestrated metaphysics as the study of

the abstract realities. The implication of this to the realist is that metaphysics studies nothing.

With these earlier philosophers, man and his place in the universe was never a thing of interest in

their metaphysical thought. Thus, Copland explained that metaphysics at the earlier stages in the

philosophy history lacked the human face. This is because the nature of being was never an object

of metaphysics as the earlier philosopher believed though enormously2.

Nevertheless, history may not be too compassionate to philosophy for neglecting the very

fundamental question which should have been basic the question of being. The issue of being

came up, surprisingly not at the modern period which is believed to have had a wind of

humanitarianism from the Renaissance period where philosophers like Montaigne in his Essays

spoke on the condition of man and the problem of war, but in the contemporary era when the

issues of scientific inquiry almost defaced the real nature of things. However the modern period

did not go without a great impact on the subsequent epoch. It was during this epoch, that many

thinkers reacted against the abstractness of metaphysics even though some philosophers went to

extremes into metaphysical nihilism. In a sense some philosophers of these epochs attempted to

shot the door against metaphysics as to avoid the ambiguity that goes with it; an act which

became evident in the philosophy of David Hume who said that all works of metaphysics should

be committed to flames because they are nothing but illusion and sophistory3. But we cannot

afford to heed the advice of Hume because that would be too radical for comfort. We may

however see reasons with Immanuel Kant who in his Critique of Pure Reason, brought out the

transcendental dialectic wherein he designated a new concept of metaphysics. For Kant,

the science which with all its preliminaries has for its special object the

solution to these problems is named metaphysics- a science which is at

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the very outset dogmatical that is, it confidently takes upon itself the

execution of this task without any previous investigation of the ability or

inability of reason for such an undertaking4.

The above comments by Kant seem at a glance like an outright critique of metaphysics but a

deeper look into his thesis would bring us to the fact that he is trying to prescribe a new pattern

for metaphysics which would include an inquiry into reality as it is. Fredrick Copleston seems to

understand Kant well in his pursuit as he explained the Kantian position as “explaining the real

coverage of metaphysics”. Copleston stated that, according to Kant, “we must acknowledge that

metaphysics represents levels of human life which are not catered for by sheer empiricism”5.

Philosophers were set to answer the Kantian call by rescuing metaphysics from the

forgetfulness of being which suffuses it. This search for the value of Being brought into the works

of contemporary philosophers a solution to the problem of the abstractness of metaphysics. This

result was felt most in the philosophy of Martin Heidegger who, through the influence of

Husserl’s phenomenology developed a system of ontology which has given a new appreciation to

metaphysics.

Martin Heidegger saw in his predecessors’ thought a metaphysics that was

foundationless. He accused them of the same traditional abstract problem of their metaphysical

thought which balled down to the forgetfulness of being. Having done this, he made some very

vital effort restate the foot of metaphysics back to the ground by giving it a foundation which

formed basis for any inquiry into existence. This re- instatement was carried on by Heidegger

through a destruction of metaphysics (this term spanned through the philosophy of Husserl to

Heidegger. Despite his conspicuous silence about the origin of the term in his work, it is evident

that he borrowed it from Husserl). This destruction as we shall see later in detail does not have a

negative connotation. It is an attempt by Heidegger to reintroduce a foundation for metaphysics

and philosophy generally. The above informed his centralization of being in his treatise Being

and Time. This centralization has a second motive which was aimed at solving the problem of

predication of being which was predominant among his predecessors dating back to Aristotle (see

Heidegger‘s explanation of philosophy Being and Time).

Heidegger’s journey into the world of metaphysics started with the ontological

deconstruction- a phenomenological analysis of being. To begin this deconstruction, Heidegger

designated Dasein. This postulation of Dasein represented his effort to challenge the hierarchical

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nature of being which seems to have been created in the ontological system from the time of Plato

and Aristotle down to the medieval philosophers. Dasein, following the prime understanding, of

Heidegger cannot be immediately concluded to be man as many would want to believe but a term

used to represent his general concept of being primarily(this idea will be explained in better

details in the course of this work). The issue of man as Dasein came up as an attempt to answer

the question of being. In order to answer the question of being, there is need for a being that is

endowed with consciousness. Dasein of stone, grass etc cannot answer this question since they

lack consciousness and thereby the capability to understand beingnss and thus answer the

question of being. As a result of this, man as Dasein steps in to fulfill this task of answering the

question of being. This discovery led him to the conclusion that.

The Dasein in man characterizes him as that essent who placed in

the midst of essents, comports himself to them as such. This

comportment determines man in his Being and makes him essentially

different from all other essents which are manifest to him.6

By the above statement, Heidegger projected more understandingly the

phenomenological method. This method as invoked by Heidegger is such that the things show

themselves as they are to Dasein, which has some sort of presuppositional understanding of them.

Heidegger was more interested in how to reach the wholeness of being, having raised the very

question of being. This informs his fundamental ontology which is established on this same

phenomenological method and thus serves as grounding to other ontologies.

Heidegger’s effort was geared towards making good the seeming in the thoughts of the

classical metaphysicians which was a view that the humanity could be thought of in the same way

as other things. He did this by transforming the very concept of being from a highly abstract and

remote concept into a subject matter of great interest. He, in this way, gave a new and clearer

explanation of being as being and other beings akin to it. He saw the place of man in the universe

as privileged. We must recall here that one of the problems which Heidegger pointed out was that

the earlier philosophers lost the mark by not realizing this very place of man in the universe.

In his explication of this, Heidegger presented ‘Dasein’. Dasein is at the centre of the

universe. Being is understood, as a result, by the destructuring of Dasein. Having represented the

qualities of Dasein-‘being there’, he went further to find the place of Dasein in the universe.

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Explaining the nature of man and his place in the universe entailed for Heidegger an

acknowledgement of the very great aspect of the human life the aspect of his temporality. The

trace of this temporality of Dasein begins with the understanding of man’s nature in the world as

‘thrownness’. Man is thrown into the world.

Finding himself in the world in that manner, man tries to get meaning out this world

where he has been thrown. He achieves this by constantly transcending himself. It is in this

transcendence that man is meant to come face to face with man’s own-most- possibility- death.

This aspect of Heidegger’s work cements his very concept of Dasein’s authentic or inauthentic

existence. Man’s authenticity lies in his acceptance of his own-most-possibility- death. This

authenticity of life of man is what sums up the ontological deconstruction of Heidegger.

Therefore when man attempts to constantly run away from this reality by living the life of the

crowd, he lives an inauthentic life.

1.2 Statement of the Problem

The interest of Martin Heidegger was to explain being as such, through the explanation of

the place of Dasein as the being in the world which has the task of understanding the beings

present- at- hand. In doing this, he became prepared to fight back the foot of metaphysics to the

ground from the suspension given to it during the earlier periods of philosophy especially during

the scholastic period. With the rise of Martin Heidegger in the contemporary epoch of

philosophy, the study of ‘Being’ became a centre point in the study of metaphysics. Dasein

(which is understood to be to man) becomes the gate way to the understanding of other beings

and ‘Being’ as such. Dasein therefore is aware of his being and the possibilities that face him and

equally is aware of the other beings.

The knowledge which this Dasein possesses of other beings is through phenomenology

which leads Dasein to ‘Aletheia’- truth (this truth is deeper than the normal epistemological truth.

We could call his revelation). With this truth Dasein finds himself in the world with his

limitedness and temporality. From here one strives to achieve an authenticity which one gains by

living an individual life towards death or an inauthentic life of the crowd. The consequences of

Heidegger’s thought are enormous. Many psychologists may look at his thought with dismay

since he may have failed to recognize the psychological interplay between the body and mind

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towards death. Some analytic philosophers may be so disappointed at Heidegger’s reductionism.

Any way each group of people may have different reactions towards this work of Heidegger on

the ontological deconstruction. This work therefore, attempts a study of this ontological

deconstruction with a view to answering the following questions:

How far did Heidegger achieve the ontological deconstruction for which he set

out in the Being and Time?

How realistic is this ontological deconstruction especially in Heidegger’s attempt

to analyze Dasein as a being toward death?

What are the implications of this ontological deconstruction to philosophy in

general?

To what extent did Heidegger’s phenomenological method aid his inquiries to

the problem of being?

1.3 Purpose of the Study

The above exposé of Heidegger’s understanding of Ontology and his further inquiry which

culminated in his discourse on Dasein as the centre of being brings up very salient issues for

philosophy. Many thinkers tend to reason deeper into this work of Heidegger to sift out the

existential problem which metaphysics seem to have. This thesis aims at showing, through of

critical evaluation, the relevance of Heidegger’s ontology to contemporary society and

philosophy. This work further has its purpose centered on the analysis of Heidegger’s work in

order to rediscover the place of man in the universe.

1.4 Scope of the Study

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This work focuses on the on the deconstruction of ontology as an aspect of Heidegger’s

metaphysics as presented in the Being and Time.

Within this framework, we shall be dealing with the deconstruction of being within which we

shall examine the nature of man, Being and the world, as Heidegger understands it. This will

include analysis of Heidegger’s methodology, his concept of being, the nature of man as Dasein,

the metaphysics of death and as well, the various arguments that led him to his conclusion.

1.5 Significance of the Study.

The significance of Heidegger’s ontology lies in the need to ascertain the place of man in the

universe and tackle the contemporary problem of humanness in this scientific universe. This

work, therefore, will be useful not only to professional philosophers but equally to scientists and

humanitarian agencies for, they would be helped to give man a befitting place-in the universe.

This work would equally aid the general people to attain authenticity of existence.

1.6 Methodology

Data for this research is sourced from books, articles periodicals and internet materials. This

research would be expository in its approach. It would go into an exposition of the problem,

which has been mentioned above. The method of critical analysis will also be employed in the

course of the evaluation of Heidegger’s work. We shall finally make use of the analytic method.

Here the various tenets there in Heidegger’s thesis would be examined.

1.7 Thesis

The thesis of this work on Heidegger’s ontological deconstruction is that Heidegger’s aim

in the Being and Time to inquire into beingness was not achieved.

Secondly, his understanding of Dasein and its history is problematic.

Finally the ideas projected by Heidegger were original to some extent though obscure but

informative and relevant to human existence.

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END NOTES

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1. A. Coupland, The History of contemporary Philosophy (London: William Clowes and

sons Ltd., 1972), 13.

2. Coupland, 14

3. See David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human understanding (London: Diet Books,

1983), 62

4. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason trans by Vasilis Politis (London: J. M. Dent

pub. Group 1993), 33

5. Fredrick Copleston, A History of Philosophy vol. vi. (New York: Double Day books

1994),293

6. Martin Heidegger, Kant and the problem of metaphysics trans. By James Churchill

(London: Indiana University press 1968), 241.

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CHAPTER TWO

Literature Review

Martin Heidegger set out to tackle the very problem of being which his predecessors, according to

him forgot. He delineated the problem of ‘being’ as central to metaphysics and philosophy at large. His

quest to explain being and the problem of ontology led him to Dasein in terms of (man); a man bound by

temporality and continually seeks authenticity. His effort was to rectify the problem of which Dasein is

the theme and therefore given a preliminary ontological analysis of the subjectivity of this subject. This

problem was evidently lacking in the works of his predecessors.

In this chapter, we shall review the works of philosophers, from different epochs, which gave root

to Heidegger’s problem of ontology. This review will help us understand Heidegger’s discuss on the

ontological deconstruction in relation to Dasein, which, he affirms, answers the question of (being in

general) being qua being.

The very beginning of Heidegger’s Being and Time was the acknowledgement of the role of

ontology in the philosophical works of the ancient philosophers especially Plato and Aristotle stating that

the question of being is such one which provided a stimulus for the researches of Plato and Aristotle.…1

The above question of being as Heidegger observed, led Plato to go into finding of objective essences

which formed his discourses in ontology. These essences were found in the forms (eidos).These essences

came up clearly in the Phaedo. Plato in this work- Phaedo stressed that being is the totality of existence.

The use of the word idea, by Plato, as against the secular usage, points to the objective contents or

reference of our universal concepts. For Plato, reality is divided into two the physical and non physical.

The non physical is the real and thereby constitutes the very essential part in the analysis of the world.

This universe of being, the author understood, would hardly be explained without man. Thus he

set out to explain man and man’s attitude towards actualizing himself. Man is principally the soul; the

very essence of human existence. Phaedo divided the soul into two parts namely: the rational and the

irrational parts. The irrational is further subdivided into two namely: the spirit and the appetites.

Primarily, the soul is understood as an attribute of God in man and therefore it is the essence of man2. The

rational part of the soul was created by the God whereas the irrational part was crated by the celestial

gods; these same celestial gods are responsible for forming the body. In the pre-existence, the rational part

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participates in the world of forms even though the nature of the irrational part is present already. The

nature of the irrational soul leaves in it the tendency to descend at all times. The irrational soul is not

perfect thus it is unruly and pulls the soul down towards the earth. Thus Plato explained:

When perfect and fully winged, the soul soars upward…whereas the

imperfect soul losing its wings and dropping in her flight at last settles

on the solid ground and there finding a home, she receives an earthly

frame… This composition of soul and body is called (man) a living

creature3.

The falling of the soul is actually what makes it encounter the body. The soul is immortal,

immaterial and spiritual. Being so, the soul lives on even after the death of the body since it is non-

generated and indestructible. The soul is characterized by cognitive and intellectual features. Suffice it to

say that the soul reasons. It regulates the desires and affections of the body. Thus, the soul animates the

body. A very important aspect of this work lies in the explanation of the man, his attempt to achieve

actualization which is achieved through mortification and the understanding of death of the individual.

The author did not mince words placing the body as a faculty of relaxation that which when

obeyed leads the human soul down. This pull which the soul experiences is as a result of the constant

mixing up of the soul with some mass of evil which the body encounters in the world. The author states:

We have found… a path of speculation which seems to bring us and the

argument to the conclusion that while we are in the body and while the

soul is mingled with this mass of evil, our desire will not be satisfied,

and our desire is of the truth …4

By this quotation, Plato attempted to explain that the actualization of the individual lies in his

every day attempt to transcend bodily pleasure: food, money (for which many wars are fought), lust etc.

The purity of the mind should remain paramount in the in the very existence of the human being. When

this is achieved, then the person is gallantly prepared for the transition which comes at death. It is at death

that the full actualization of the human person is achieved. This actualization is not like the exposition of

man as a being unto death no! It is a period of revelation of a lot of things which while in the company of

the body the soul cannot have pure knowledge of5. Death is a period of purification. Purification here is

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understood by Plato as “a separation of the soul from the body, a habit of the soul gathering and collecting

herself into herself, out of the courses of the body; the dwelling in her own place alone, as in another life,

so also in this, as far as she can- the release of the soul from the chains of the body”.6

There is an implication to this work of Plato. There appears to be a split of the world into two

parts the material and the immaterial. However, we may require seeing Plato the relationship this world

has with God. By his explanation, there is an evident designation of a world with transcendental essences.

But these essences including the superlative- God seem to be described within timeness. God by the very

understanding of Him is a being of eternity not a being within timeness.

One, at this juncture, does not become surprised at Martin Heidegger’s explanation of God’s

nature in relation to the being of other things in his ontology. Heidegger understands and seeks to explain

God through worldhood and beings in general following the various natures of the various beings.

Heidegger explains the being of God and the universe as substance relatively. By the very definition of

substance as quam rem quae ita existit, ut alia re indigeat ad existendum- that which exists and which

requires nothing but itself to exist, the nature of God as eternal comes out clear. By Heidegger’s

elaboration, a substance is that which requires nothing else to exist- ens perfectectissimum.

Heidegger attempting to explain this struck the difference between God as an uncreated being and

the other beings which are uncreated. For him,

The being of that substance whose distinctive ‘proprietas’ is presented by extension

thus becomes definable in principle ontologically if we clarify the meaning of being

which is common to the three kinds of substances one of them infinite others finite. But

the name substance does not call together God and other things so that it is in the same

specie that is … That God and the creatures are the same …7

(translation from Greek-

English Language is mine)

For Heidegger, the eternity of God differentiates His beingness from the beingness of other things

which are created. This therefore accounts God as a purely ontological term which exists not in time but

possesses the quality of explainability by His being self evident. The above was what Plato seemed to

have muddled up in his Phaedo while trying to suggest God’s existence of God in time.

The ontological dualism of Plato and the Place of God therein came up succinctly in his other

work The Timaeus. The Demiurge creates things in the sensible world according to the model of forms.

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By implication, the beings of the sensible world exist as distinct from the forms. Here there is a

multiplicity in beingness against the real nature of God himself as one. With this Plato tried to establish

some principle of unity to the world of diversity. In the early part of the work, the author made a

distinction between the world of things and the nature of the beings so called. He asks: what is that which

is always real and has no becoming and what is that which is always becoming but never real?8

The above question raised in this work led Plato to the consideration of the kinds of beings in his

work. He designated the first kind of being as beings which are apprehended in belief and sense. These

sorts of beings for him are very transient and thus are unreal. The second are apprehended by thought/

reason and as such are unchangeably real. He emphasized the transient nature of the former kind of beings

and their dependence of the latter thus

All that becomes must needs [sic] become by to be. Now whenever the maker of anything

looks to that which is always unchanging and uses the model of that description in

fashioning the form and quality of his work all that he thus accomplishes must be good.9

Heidegger’s work on the question of being here seems to fall in line with Plato’s ideas. On Plato’s

part, he became more interested not on the nature of being but on the origin of beingness in the first place,

a question which seems to elude Heidegger himself. While Heidegger hinged the origin of being on the

thrownness of the Dasein, Plato raised his question on being in this manner

So concerning the heavens or the world let us call it by whatsoever name may be most

acceptable to it. We must ask the question which, it is agreed, must be asked at the outset

of inquiry concerning anything: has it always been, without any source of becoming; or

has it come to be, starting from some beginning?10

The above questions seem urgent to the inquiry into the analysis of being which starts with the

explanation of man as seen in his the Republic. Here, the author gave further insight into the functioning

of this ‘person’ who tries to achieve authenticity in this world where it has come in by a pull from the

irrational soul. The Republic explains the parts of the soul namely the rational, the appetitive and spirited.

These three parts clearly represent the inner cravings of man to come to terms with reality of himself and

his destination and purpose in the world. He explained the acts of these parts of the soul as outstanding

conflict. In the above work, one finds out some realities to reckon with. Primarily, there is an awareness

of goal and there is need for a conscious effort to achieve this goal then there are the bodily desires. The

first activity which is the awareness of goal is an act of reason. In this, man is immediately confronted

with the fallenness of his nature since he appeared into the world encapsulated in the body.

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Man thus understands this and reasons out steps to self- actualization which is a goal for his

being. The spirit-soul takes man to action. This part is responsible for the various steps which man takes

to understand his world and conquer himself. This is action laden! The soul’s effort is for a mission- to

reach the goal discovered in the rational soul. The appetitive soul represents the desire to draw back, to

merely relax in the world effortless just for pleasure as it were. The work subscribed to this because of the

understanding that the soul is the principle of life and movement.

This tripatheid explanation of the soul followed from the fact that man’s internal conflicts portray

different springs of action at work. Man by the action of reason could have a focus but is weighed down

by the activity of the appetitive soul. In this case, the person remains redundant living a day by day life

having been conquered by the sensual appetite. The power of action by the spirit soul could be pull

towards either direction depending on the impressive nature of any of the souls. Despite the fact that the

will of man and the vision as given by the rational soul is present, the strength of dominance of the

appetite could over-ride that of reason hence both are left redundant. The reason works with the spirit and

appetite and equally influences them. And they equally act upon the reason but this interrelationship is

determined by the nature of reason which is primarily goal seeking and measuring faculty.

The very function of the rational part of the soul is to seek the true goal of human life, an act

which it performs by evaluating things according to their true nature. Suffice it to say that the rational

soul answers the question of being and explains everything as they are in themselves. The rational soul

equally permeates the world of fantasy and from there, discovers the true world and activities directing

the passions towards true happiness. With this, the activities of the appetitive soul which ends up

deceiving us as to the fantasies which lead to immediate pleasures would be rendered inactive by the

activity of the rational soul.

The above cited works by Plato, stress the nature of man and man’s place in the universe. The

works by Plato saw man as the soul. They emphasized the fact that man’s vision is embedded in the

rational part of his soul. This vision of man is a vision to transcend his dormant state and achieve a goal

of self-authentication. The soul nevertheless may not find this very easy because of the eternal conflicts

that go on among the parts of the soul. This view, despite some shortcomings therein, still goes a long

way to explain the fact that man’s need for self actualization is primary to the soul. The works equally

presented a novel understanding of man as a being which explains the other beings a thesis which became

paramount to Heidegger as he attempts to explain the very concept of being in his writing Being and

Time.

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The Platonic thought on the problem of beingness and the world was followed up by his

student and friend Aristotle. The very appreciation which Aristotle made of the work of Plato was his

concept of dualism which seems to put beingness in a parallel position with itself. In the Categories

Aristotle attempted to expose exactly what the nature of being is. He made his departure from the very

concept of universals. For him many things of different species are called by different names. This unity

in naming represents the statement of essence. These universals do not exist independent of the body to

which it is attached.

This delineation brought him to the theory of substances which gives a clearer view to the

ontology of Aristotle. Substances as understood by Aristotle are realities to which reference could be

made. This is against the accidents that inhere on these substances. “Substances are such that they could

have negative or positive statements made on them that is to say that substance in the truest and strictest

the primary sense of that term is that which is neither asserted of nor can be found in a subject.”11

To be

sure, all things except the primary substances are predicates to the primary substances.

The Categories of Aristotle seem some worth suspended when understood in isolation. However,

his later writing on Metaphysics seems to make his earlier points clearer. In the first place, the unity in

existence which he separated in the Categories as substance and accidents was brought together in the

Metaphysics in Aristotle’s attempt to deal with ontology. It was the fourth part of this Metaphysics that

Aristotle named the study of being as such. Thus while sciences go into the study of this aspect or that

aspect of being, the philosopher goes into the study of being qua being and other beings with their various

attributes. He stated therefore that

…the being qua being has peculiar modifications and it is about these that it is a

philosopher’s function to discover the truth… It is clear then from these considerations

also, that it pertains to a single science to study being qua being…12

To say that something is, is a projection of its unity, which is an essential attribute of being. As

such, just as being itself is found in all categories, so unity is equally found in the categories. If we define

man as a rational animal, for instance, animality becomes a genius while the rationality import becomes

the specificity which differentiates man from the other animals in the same genus. We can see that the

animality of the rationality of man cannot be predicated. Thus, Being cannot just be a genius. Being is not

predicated to all things that are in existence in the same sense. The level of beingness possessed by a

substance is quite different from beingness possessed by an accident like quantity, like quality, etc.

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With the above distinction in the level of beingness, Aristotle explained the major concerns of

metaphysics as an inquiry into being as being. The true nature of being consists in unchangeability and

self existence. This self existent being is motionless and puts other things into motion. The existence of

this Being is provable by the impossibility of an infinite series of existent sources of movement. This

motionless being which comprises the full nature of being has a divine nature. This idea raised in the

works of Aristotle relegated the metaphysics of Aristotle to theology. One may not be surprised seeing it

as a very instrument for Aquinas’ theological philosophy which was formerly presented in the Summa

Theologiae.

Aristotle went further to deepen the Plato’s analysis of the substances in which he (Plato) sought

to explain the real world and the world of mimesis in which the beings in the real world are copies of

those in the ideal. For Aristotle, the Argument of Plato on the possibility of scientific knowledge proves

that the concept of the universals are not mere fictions but are real but are not (as Plato believed)

subsistence apart from the individual things they inhere in. The above elaboration of Aristotle on Plato’s

work seems to bring Plato’s work theory of forms under question. If we look at Plato’s theory of forms,

we will see that there is an apparent incompleteness and/or wired implication therein. Thus Aristotle

commented:

Of the ways in which we prove that the forms exist none is convincing for from some,

no inference necessarily follows, and from some it follows that there are forms of

things of which we think there are no forms 13

.

Aristotle from the above tried to explain that forms as we see them are merely but a useless

doubling of the visible things. But it does help simply to suppose the existence of the existence of another

multitude of things as Plato does. Plato, for Aristotle, is like a man who, unable to count with a small

number, thinks he will find it easier to do so if he doubles the number 14

. In brief, the forms, according to

Aristotle, are useless for our understanding the nature of the world and beingness. The above show forth

the outright interest of Aristotle in the phenomenal universe. Forms must therefore be understood as that

which have their beingness tied to the matter and forming one single whole and visible entity with it.

The explanation of this is further made clearer by Aristotle in the ‘De Animae’ using the nature of

man. In this book, Aristotle presented the idea of the man as a composite reality. However the work still

acknowledged the soul as the very essence of man15

. The soul as the essence of man, nevertheless, is not

separated from the body. According to the work, the soul was combined in itself the lower forms of the

soul which include: the vegetative, the nutritive, and the sensitive parts, equally, the rational soul is

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i

included here. In the rational soul lies the power of scientific thought. The science that knows the very

end of man, according to the work, is the most authoritative of all sciences. This reason which apprehends

all truths and which is capable of distinction of things equally understands the relation of things to each

other. Reason has power of deliberation and this enables man not only to known what truth there is in

nature of things but also enables him to guard his behaviour.

The soul forms part of the whole which is the very essential part. This form (soul) sets an end for

man and man has the power to become what the form/soul has set for it. There is in man, ipso facto, a

dynamic power and drive to strife towards an “end”. This striving could be towards achieving an external

set target or to achieve ends, which pertain to one’s internal nature-the drive for self actualization, which

is gained when man fulfils his nature as man by the act of cogitation. The work called this self-contained

end, entelechy- the definitive form of the body. But to show the necessity of the body in this self-

actualization task, the work emphasized that without the body; the soul could neither be nor exercise its

functions. The soul is not encapsulated in the body as a prisoner but the two elements together from one

single substance. The work tied the soul to the body so closely together that we could surmise that when

the body dies, the soul which is the entelechy- the organizing principle equally dies.

Man posses three parts of soul namely: the vegetative soul, the rational soul and the sensitive

soul. Like the sensitive soul, the rational soul is characterized by potentiality. The work succinctly

differentiated actuality from potentiality. Although, the work stated that actuality emerges from

potentiality, there is no necessary movement from potentiality of being a man, but we cannot know of this

potentiality without reference to the actuality of man who must there be prior to him, an actual man. A

fundamental mode of change in the final analysis is the change from potentiality to actuality. Reason has

its knowledge only potentially to the extent that the conclusion arrived at by it must be reasoned out. It is

enough to say that the human thought, in fact, is a possibility and not actuality in the continuous sense of

it. This is simply because the probability of gaining knowledge by the human thought could be positive or

negative. Therefore the human mind stands a chance of gaining knowledge or not gaining knowledge.

The human thought is intermittent between potentiality and actuality in relation to what the mind

knows. Truth following this judgment is not constantly present in the human mind. It vacillates based on

the circumstance of knowledge seeking. The continuity of truth is implied by the continuity of the world;

what the human mind has as potential knowledge must be perfect and continuous knowledge in some

mind.

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Aristotle emphasized the active nature of the soul and further compared the human soul, which

always seeks self-actualization and meaning through action, with the animals and finally stretched this

very comparison to the Nous. In the comparison between the human and the animals, in the Physics,

Aristotle stressed that certain things exist by nature while others exist from other causes. He stressed that

based on the things that exist by their nature, there are hierarchies.

This hierarchical explanation suggests that some realities possess more existence than the others.

Man, because of the possession of soul and reason, has more existence emphasized, directs these realities

to a particular end. The human end determined by the soul seeks a better understanding to his universe

while the emotions of animals drive them towards the human will. To say the least, the lower realities in

the hierarchy are constrained to follow the dictates of man and dance towards man’s will. All contribute

to man’s achievement of his ends.

On the other hand, comparing the human intellect and the Nous, the De Anima stressed that while

the human intellect (active intellect) knows only intermittently, the ‘Nous’ is independent of man and is

eternal. The active intellect is indeed purely active and thus, it possesses no potentiality. The act of the

Nous is a pure act, which is an exercise of the mind in complete harmony with the truth about the whole

reality. Hence, the whole system of form is taken as the intelligible structure of all things. This structure,

therefore, must constitute the continuous knowledge of the ‘beingness’ of the world and the whole of

reality. Since the active intellect is immortal, and to the extent our passive and actual intellects perceive

any truth (at any level), the human intellect at that level, possesses in them what the active intellect

knows. At death, some parts of man remain immortal. These parts of man which remain immortal belong

to the active intellect and continually participate in the ‘beingness’ of the active intellect. But those parts

that are not form of the nous perish with the matter for which it was the form. Only pure things are eternal

but man’s substance being mixed up with potentiality dies off.

This work emphasized what the end which man direly seeks entailed. A man has a distinctive

mode of activity and possess ends sequel to the various parts of his soul, the vegetative, the sensitive, and

the rational. First of all, the work emphasized that the end of man is not merely life. This is because he

shares life vegetables. Then since this is the case, we want something peculiar to man as his end. This

must also not be sensation since even animals like man is one of the elements which possesses a rational

principle. This active life of man demonstrates the ability of man to transcend the ordinary life level he

shared with vegetables and animals. It is a search for authenticity and self-consciousness which is found

in human good in accordance with virtue, according to the Nichomachean Ethics by the same author.

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Man’s life and endeavor constantly move towards an end which is to give meaning to one’s life and

interpret the world through self consciousness. This issue cannot be fully understood without another

reference to his work Physics.

The issue of time which formed the essential part of Heidegger’s discourse on Being was dealt

with by Aristotle in the Chapter X of his Physics. The concept of time arose in the work of Aristotle in his

attempt to explain better the concept of motion. But the obscurity that surrounds the concept of time

makes it rather difficult for one to understand whether time exists or not. Aristotle began his discourse on

time from the division of time. According to him, time is divided into two parts the future and the past. As

for the present, it is not a part of time at all, for a part measures the whole, and the whole must be made

up of the parts, but we cannot say that time is made of ‘nows’ 16

.

The time now cannot be divided into the past and the future it is always one and the same

undivided time. This is such that there are no two ‘nows’ that can coexist, one must succeed the next. If

the current now is still active as in presence, there is no way we can talk about it as having passed and the

passed now cannot retain in itself a quality of presence which the time now has. Time, by this Aristotelian

understanding, strikes us with some passing along- a change of events of time. The changes of the events

of time are particular to event but changes in time are everywhere and in relation to everything. This

suggests the Aristotelian concept of time as absolute. Changes may are appear faster or slower but time

remains steady in its motion and flow since fastness and slowness are measured by time still but

accordingly, time cannot measure time thus as though it were a distance (like space passed through

motion) or a qualitative modification, as in other kinds of change 17

.

The changes which occur in time give credence to the understanding of time by Aristotle as

duration. This overt understanding of time by Aristotle became a serious point of concern for Heidegger

whose analysis of time was geared towards a redirection of this Aristotelian stand which runs through the

history of philosophy until the time of Henri Bergson. For Heidegger, therefore, his task as a whole

requires that the conception of time thus obtained shall be distinguished from the way in which it is

ordinarily understood. This ordinary way of understanding it has become explicit in an interpretation

precipitated in the traditional concept of time, which has persisted from Aristotle to Bergson and even

beyond 18

. For Heidegger instead the concept of time should spring from temporality against Bergson’s

tying of time to space. Time for Heidegger serves as that which distinguishes the various realm of being.

Thus against Aristotle’s concept, time has a self evident ontological function of its own accord within the

horizon of its existence.

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The problem of time was recorded again more astutely in the medieval period, in the Confessions

of Augustine who portends that the existence of time lies in the human soul. The beginning of

Augustine’s inquiry into time arose as a kind of question about creationism. The being of God in the first

place is eternal as against other beings including man which are contingent in their beingness. Thus the

beingness of all other beings that are contingent is owed to that being that is eternal. Thus the whole

activities in this contingent universe and even the truth which man can boast of come from this eternal

being, who makes this truth possible by illuminating the mind. God created the world of beings in time

and so all other beings that are in the world. The seeming dubious question that may arise from the above

is: what was God doing from the eternity from whence he came before he decided to create the world? To

this Augustine said:

I answer not as a certain person is reported to have done facetiously… He was preparing

hell for those who pry into mysteries… 19

Augustine saw the question of creatio in terminus as a great mystery thus he sought to shy away

from gaining glory for making mockery of himself in a bid to give an answer to what he is not sure of. He

counted time as one of those things created by God. Thus to ask a question about what God did before

creation is another way of defining God through time. Before the creation there was no time. Therefore, if

a roving thought should wander through the images of bygone time and wonder that “thou the God

almighty … didst for innumerable ages refrain from such great work before thou wouldst make it let him

awake and consider that he wonders at false things….”20

Evidently, the mystery of time and the

profundity of God’s glorious nature beclouded the Augustinian concept of beingness in relation to time.

However, he did not lose the mark entirely by proposing dogmatic principles of time in relation to

the beings in the universe. He primarily judged time in relation to God. And since God is timeless, the

concept of time is left for the contingent to hold unto even though the very concept of time is unknown by

man himself who is, according to Augustine, at the centre of God’s creation. He expressed the

problematic in the definition of time by man as such:

What then is time? If no one asks of me I know; if I wish to explain to him who

asks I know not… Yet I say with confidence that I know that if nothing passed

away, there would not be past time, and if nothing were there would be no present

and if there were nothing coming then their would be no future. 21

He seems to be lost in his rational concept of time and thus attempted to grasp the concept time

by analysis. He thus concluded that what we call time are packs of the mental encounters. Thus time does

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not really exist. Time has no objective existence outside the human mind. The past is but the human mind

remembering. The future is the human mind in expectancy. The present, not taken away from the mind

like the past and the future, is the human mind as it considers; it serves as a reference point to the past and

the future since it is the human mind which is in the presence that remembers and expects. Time

according to Augustine in brief is a mental phenomenon. Thus the measurement of time according to

Augustine was given to the mind. He said:

[I]t is in you O my mind that I measure times. Do not overwhelm me with thy clamor.

That is, do not overwhelm thyself with the multitude of thy impressions. In thee I say I

measure times; the impressions which things as they pass by make on thee and which

when they have passed by, remains, that I measure as present, not those things which

have passed by, that the impressions should be made. This I measure when I measure

times.22

The very explanation of Augustine on time evidently cut deep into what Martin Heidegger tried

to accomplish in the later epoch. Heidegger may not argue with Augustine on the role of the human mind

or consciousness in getting at the real concept of time. But Heidegger may not appreciate the

reductionism that greeted the Augustinian theory of time. Man as a being in the world tries to accomplish

his actualization in his awareness of his temporality which performs an ontological function on him. Time

therefore for Augustine is duration which is merely dependent on the existence of the human mind.

Heidegger’s task of rescuing timeness from duration therefore cuts across the Augustine’s concept of time

as well.

The emphasis of Augustine on the human mind cannot be taken away from his very concept the

human being as the being at the centre of the universe and which gives meaning to the world. In the

Confessions man is seen as a rational soul using an earthly body. The work further sees the soul as the

essential part of man; a spiritual substance which is superior and influences the body. The soul moves the

body but in turn the body cannot move the soul or influence it because it is subject to the soul. The soul

animates the body. When it increases or intensifies its activity in a particular part of the body. When this

happens, the power of sensation is exercised. Any error in grasping reality is not the fact of the soul but

the deficiency which stems from the mutability of both the object of sensation and the perceiving sense

true knowledge is immutable.

The mind being the essence of man contemplates eternal truth without any sensual intervention.

The mind judges the corporeal objects according to eternal and incorporeal standards. At this level, we

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i

can talk about rationality. The human mind participates in the perfection and the indestructibility of the

perfect one. Thus, there is no conciliation whatsoever for the soul/mind. The world is explainable in the

true sense of it by the human mind. Thus the eternal truth is common to the mind but not given to the

body. Man is basically a spiritual entity which participates in the perfection of God.

In the Summa Theologica Thomas Aquinas writes about the unity of the soul as a major human

characterization. The work designated this unity as substantial not accidental; thus, the relationship

between the form and matter was used in this illustration, a relationship which the work stated constitutes

one unified entity. However he believed that the soul forms the first principle and itself subsistent thus:

By virtue of his soul, man is man, an animal, a living substance and a being.

Therefore, the soul/gives man every essential degree of perfection, moreover, it

gives the body a share in the fact of being where it really exists23

.

The soul is naturally incorruptible and immortal. When one dies the soul is separated from the

body but still continues its existence. The soul gives man life, understanding and special specific

functions. The soul equally accounts for man’s capacity for sensation and the power of the intellect and

will. The highest capacity of man is located in his intellect that makes him a rational animal and gives

man the capability of divine contemplation.

Saying that man is a physical substance underscored the substantial unity of man. As a physical

substance man is a composite of body and soul. The work explained that angels in contrast with man are

just pure intelligence i.e. they have no body. Man is also a rational animal with his special attribute which

is to exist and function as man when it is a unified whole, a unity of body a soul. Man’s highest capacity

is located in his intellect. By carrying out its designated function the intellect is meant to direct man to his

end and help man in organizing and understanding his existence.

The modern period saw the dawn of a new aspect of thought. The philosophers within this period

attempted to situate beingness on the realm of existential importance; an importance which has its criteria

set on the source of true knowledge. Emphasis at this epoch was fully laid on the place of man as the

centre of existence based on man’s position as a knowing subject. This aspect of their philosophy

necessarily led to this issue of the place of man in the universe as a being per se.

The Discourses on the Method by Rene Descartes represented his attempt to expunge doubt from

knowledge. The Cartesian philosophy began with the method skepticism which helped him in the dawn of

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the 15th century to set the ball rolling for the philosophies that follow suit. Descartes methodic doubt

brought about the cogito ergo sum which served as a foundation to his philosophy; he said

[I] am obliged to speak… to make it possible to judge whether the foundation I have

chosen is secure enough. And observing that this truth… was so solid and secure…. I

judge that I need no scruple to accept it as the first philosophy principle that I seek. 24

Descartes’ embarrassment by the level of doubt that covers his thought resolved to doubt

everything in so far as it is doubtable. He extended his doubt to everything that is dubitable but

discovered through many rigors that he cannot doubt himself because for him (Descartes) to doubt that he

is doubting gives him a surer proof of his existence as a rational being. Thus for one to be able to doubt

one must exist. Thus he gave philosophy an expression- cogito ergo sum loaded with implications and

which accordingly has since sustained philosophical polemics through the epoch after him.

The cogito ergo sum of Descartes led him to the understanding of the knowing self which

Heidegger is more interested in. With the cogito, the idea of the thinking thing- res cogitans sprang up.

The res cogitans, for Descartes, made up the whole world of reality a view which Plato held in high

esteem. The res cogitans is distinct from the res extenza- extended thing which underlies the science

world. Evidently, the distinction given by the Descartes shows that both the res cogitans and the res

extenza are two independently and substantially separate entities which co- exist as one. This is made

clear by the very definition of substance by Descartes as that which exists on its own and requires nothing

but itself to exist 25

.

By this, Descartes emphasized the primary nature of the universe as being centred on the res

cogitans- the thinking thing, who gets to know the world that exists because of him. However, Descartes

distrust for the senses influenced his judgment on them. These things would have lost existence in the

absence of the res cogitans who has been given the privilege of knowing without doubt the dubious things

in the world. But the existence of the external world was too obvious to be ignored by Descartes thus he

dogmatically introduced the existence of God and subsequently used it to explain the scientific world. The

only quality Descartes needed to accord such a God to suit his needs of proving the science world was

‘incapability of deceit’. Thus the knowledge of the physical world came to the res cogitas as ideas which

impress themselves on the mind and further through the conviction given by God who is incapable of

deceit. He said regarding the idea of the physical world:

I have an inclination to believe that they are conveyed to me by the corporeal

substances. These ideas impress themselves on me that I cannot deny there existence.

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This is because He who is incapable of deceit gives them to me to encounter and I

clearly perceive them in my thought… Hence we must allow that corporeal world

exists26

Evidently, Descartes built the world around man the knowing subject. Thus the knowledge of the

self precedes the knowledge of God which in turn precedes the knowledge of the world. The very

existence of the two foundations namely: God and reason ousts any attempt to trace the world of things

from the phenomenal world.

Descartes’ attempt to rebuild philosophy on a solid foundation was a welcome innovation.

However, he missed his mark here and there. Heidegger does not see reasons with Descartes who in a bid

to build to philosophy anew, put philosophy into some problematic which seems to set back philosophy to

a great extent since he failed to raise the question of being appropriately. Little wonder did Heidegger in

his comparison between Descartes and the schoolmen stated that Descartes is always far behind the

schoolmen in working out the problem of being.

Heidegger appears to have made a very wonderful interpretation of the work of Descartes

especially with regard to the res cogitans and the res exenza. What Descartes called the res extenza, was

for Heidegger ontology of the world. The understanding of Descartes about the res corporea gives the

world an existential order which is substantiated by the principle of extension. The analysis of this

beingness is explained by the inclusion of God and the res cogitatum but without proper analysis as to the

nature of their beings. In the first place, the definition of substance as an existence needing nothing else to

exist appear to be give to God alone when man and other beings of the world order are viewed as ens

creatum.

However, the viewing of the beings within the world as created entities would show a sort of

independence of existence that tantamount to substantiality. However, the distinction between the beings

in the world order would have formed for Descartes a great stepping stone to the real questioning of

being. But the measure taken by Descartes made him evade this ontological question and the signification

thereof which the schoolmen as much did. Nevertheless Heidegger pointed out his disappointment

without surprise at the slant taken by the work of Descartes and the schoolmen before him explaining that

even the ontology of the schoolmen has gone no further than that of the ancient in inquiring into what

being itself may mean. So it is not surprising if no headway is made with a question like that of the way in

which Being signifies, as long as this has to be discoursed on the basis of an unclarified meaning of being

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i

which this signification expresses. “The meaning remains unclarified because it is held to be self-

evident”.27

In fact, Descartes’ first philosophy for which he was given a pride of place in philosophy for

providing a point of departure for the modern philosophical inquiry leaves most of his job undone as

regards his analysis of the cogitare and the corporea. He failed to raise the ontological question of the

Being of the sum. And until this is achieved, the cogitare cannot be grasped. The implication then is the

entire destruction of the foundation of the corporea which is characterized by extension and which is

made meaningful by the being of the ‘sum’ of the res cogitatum.

Heidegger’s issue with Descartes lies still on the forgetfulness of being. He may have reasons to

prefer some philosophers after him who even despite their lack of raising succinctly the question of being

did some great work on being and the major property of being such as timeness. Here we make reference

to the philosophy of Immanuel Kant who tried to introduce the concept of time to his metaphysics, an

inclusion which was greatly cherished by Martin Heidegger.

In the Critique of Pure Reason Immanuel Kant tried to investigate into beingness. He primarily

attempted inquiring into the problem of metaphysics in the place. The issue hereof was whether

metaphysics is capable of extending our knowledge of reality. The problem of Kant was the fact that

metaphysics unlike physics has not found any sure scientific method of application which will enable it to

solve problems. Following this discovery, Kant realized the two basic operations in analyzing being

namely: the material and nonmaterial. He said

Since then in metaphysics we do not find empirical principles, the concepts

encountered therein must be sought, not in the senses, but in the very nature of the

pure intellect…28

The above statement split the concept of beingness into two, namely: the material and the

nonmaterial. Kant did this to accommodate both the dual nature of man who studies being and the other

beings which are open to him which includes material and nonmaterial entities. This study of Kant was

made more effective by his analysis of beingness from the angle of time and space. Quite impressive

enough, this aspect of the Kantian work made more relevant in discoursing the issues pertaining

beingness; a situation which Heidegger acknowledged in the part II of his Being and Time.

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ii

The Kantian explanation of the place of time and space in his being and time came through his

understanding of the two natures in the universe which he explicitly named the noumenal and the

phenomenal natures. By his explanation, space belongs to the external world wherein everything material

is represented in the mind, which is not co-extensive, in time. He expressed this saying

[That] by the means of the external sense (a property of the mind), we represent to

ourselves objects as outside us, and all these in space. Therein alone are their shape

dimensions and relations to each other determined or determinable. The internal sense, by

means of which the mind contemplates itself or its internal state, gives, indeed, no intuition

of the mind as an object; yet there is nevertheless a determinate form under which alone the

contemplation of our internal state is possible, so that all which relates to the inward

determinations of the mind is represented in time29

The explanation of being as we can deduce from the Kantian work above becomes more

meaningful in discoursing it in terms of time and space. The transcendental exposition of time and space

shows the real nature of the beingness. With this Kant went beyond his predecessors who analyzed the

nature of being without reference to the world of space and time. However this study of Kant however

plausible did not make reference, in his study of time, to temporality. The meaning of the man, who

studies the other beings, is embedded at least in Heidegger’s understanding, on temporality of existence.

This temporality gives man history and gives vision to the world which has man at the center. This may

account for his falling out of favour with Heidegger who preferred Hegel’s discourse that centered on

world history to his (Kant’s) thought.

The Hegel in his work Reason in History, made a significant contribution to the analysis of

beingness. The relevance of his work lay in his attempt to explain beingness in terms of historicity. The

beginning of this work saw a critique of the second part of the Kantian Critique of Pure Reason in which

the author spelt out the limitations of the human mind in understanding reality. For Hegel, the Kantian

position on the unknowability of the noumena is wrong and self defeating. Hegel queried how Kant could

presume to know the existence of what he does not know? The above criticism of Kant initiated in the

mind of Hegel the idea of an absolute which accounts for the nature of Being in the first place. Hegel, in

his work, took a dialectical approach to the explanation the existential world, which he identified as

revolving around the absolute spirit.

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The author (Hegel) looked upon the world as an organic process. The absolute is the really real.

This absolute apparently is not a being outside the existential world. To explain this better, Hegel was of

the opinion that

Nothing is unrelated for this reason whatever we experience as separate things

will, upon careful reflection, lead us to other things to which they are related

until the at last the process of dialectical thought will end in the knowledge of

the absolute30

.

The above portrays nature as so tied together; everything is interrelated. It is in the careful observation of

one being we can know another which is not exactly given to us in the immediate. However, the absolute

is not the unity of the separated things. With the above, Hegel seems to reject the monist position of his

materialist predecessors, who believe that everything is one. There is, in the understanding of Hegel, a

sort of unity in diversity. The absolute therefore is not a being outside the world but the world so to speak.

This absolute can be reached by human reason because the absolute disclose itself in nature and in

the workings of the human mind. The connecting factor here is the thought. The human thought pattern is

so fixed by the natural structure. Thus a person thinks about nature the way the absolute expresses itself in

nature, just as the absolute and nature are dynamic processes, so also human thought is a process, a

dialectic process31

.

This dialectical process in existence which underlies beingness was brought out more clearly in the

work The Science of Logic by the same author. Hegel in this work made reconciliation between

metaphysics and logic. For him being is synonymous with knowing. The essence of reality therefore

consists in step by step, logical movement to the absolute. This logic here is an inner logic of reality as it

is. Hegel’s identification of the rational with the actual led him to the conclusion that logical connections

must be discovered in the actual and not empty ratiocination. He thus concluded that

Since philosophy is the exploration of the rational, it is for that very reason the

apprehension of the present and the actual, not the erection of a beyond,

supposed to exist, God knows where32

.

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Logic as we can surmise from the author is the process by which we deduce, from our experiences

of the actual the categories that describe the absolute. The above underlies the philosophy of Hegel which

is rounded in dialectics.

Hegel’s dialectical process is triadic in it nature. His is an interactive motion of the thesis and anti-

thesis to the synthesis. The beginning of this dialectics was on the explanation of beingness in which the

dialectical interaction between beingness and non-being led to the possibility of becoming. The Hegelian

dialectics which brought forth becoming as a synthesis of being and nothingness seem to make a smart

change from the Aristotelian ‘ousia’(being a separate entities) to ‘eidos’ (being as interconnective).

Heidegger would carry on this basic understanding of Hegel saying that Dasein is a being in relation to

other beings (being in the world).

The concept of becoming so called from the synthesis of being and non-being is formed by the mind

when it understands that being is the same thing as nothingness. Becoming, therefore, using Hegel’s

words, is a ‘unity of being and nothing’. This process of resolution at every stage forms a synthesis of a

higher nature such that at the end the absolute is realized this is called self-development. The most

important aspect of this Hegelian dialectics as contained in his Science of Logic is his immense use of

man as the thinking being whose ideas and thought galvanize the entirety of existence even to the

absolute. This explanation will be very acceptable to Martin Heidegger who tried to explain beingness in

terms of Dasein who answers the question of being.

The centrality of man in the explanation of beingness was made clearer by Hegel in his

Phenomenology of the Spirit. He set forth the elements of his dialectical process in which the thesis –

subjective spirit, and the anti thesis – objective spirit give rise to synthesis – absolute spirit, which is

manifested in the human mind. For him, the inner essence of the absolute is reached by the human

reason, this is because the absolute is disclosed in the workings of the human mind. From here Hegel

attempted at explaining the very nature of the person.

Men, according to Hegel, at the beginning of history are not capable of realization of their potentials.

This is tied to the fact that man is unable to conceive man’s goal adequately. The major reason for this is

the fact that the conception of man’s basic purposes, which, of course, goes with their historical form of

life, is not adequate. Men are bound to defeat their purposes. Adequate conception is thus essential to the

contradiction for the contradiction comes not from the fact that men’s purposes go away, but that men

defeated them in trying to fulfill them. In view of the above, we conveniently account for the

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inconsistency in the historical societies or even civilization which immediately stems from the fact that

the basic purposes which are conceived in terms of these societies are condemned to be self defeating just

like the men themselves.

Hegel’s historical dialectics slips quite into his concept of metaphysical reality where he explains

humanity as a conscious being. This selfhood entails self-consciousness. This concept represented in this

work has evidently got a structure of subjectivity. This subjectivity creates the awareness of the self. This

became necessary because of the sense in which the work understood knowledge as identical to

consciousness. Our knowledge and consciousness are not of any foreign reality but a consciousness of

another of us. The consciousness of another object is a consciousness of oneself in one’s other (not

another). By this fact, the work meant to express that the curtain which hid the trans-phenomenal has been

pulled away, we discover that what lies behind it is identical with what stood before it (consciousness) 33.

We know that there is, behind this curtain, some thing to see but this will be possible only when we get

behind it. This is not all about the one who goes to see but much for the things to be seen.

Explaining this dialectics in consciousness, in the light of this work, we would discover that the

emphasis was more on knowledge and the things that are knowable. Relating to self consciousness, the

emphases shifts immediately to the ideas of our minds, our actual being and what we pretend to be;

correlation between our authentic self and the inauthentic self. The dialectics of self-consciousness is

dialectic of human desires, aspirations and life circumstances. This is fulfilled in man, according this

work, by the sense of infinity, a condition in which the self (person) is not limited by any external

situation. It is the desire for integrity, a desire which underlies the effort to achieving auto-consciousness.

This is achieved after several futile trials when man must have been sharpened and educated through

conflicts and contradictions which are the real things in life.

This reality of personhood is realized only when men come to discover themselves as really

emanating from the universal Geist- Spirit. At this time, (that) the person will stop seeing the world as the

other or as a limited sphere which by virtue of man’s being in it gets limited. But if man keeps seeing the

world as an order, a limit, he can never attain this integrity he so direly desires. This is because man’s

inquiry into the world begins with himself as a finite being. This finitude of man delimits man in every

way especially when faced with the rawness and the underdeveloped form of man’s life. When man gets

to capitalize on this limitedness, he desires for integrity stands doomed until he can take a step to undergo

the very transformations which would bring him to grasping the universal where the integrity sought

could be found.

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The most striking aspect of the work of the Hegel’s work is his discourse of timeness. In his

Philosophy of Nature, Hegel developed a striking idea on time. Like his master Kant, he started his

discourse on time from the bearing it has with space. Space and time are basic realities that underlie

history (the basic understanding of Hegel’s philosophy of history shows that the history he talks about is

nothing but the history of the spirit). By virtue of Hegel’s understanding of history as the history of the

spirit, he will yet be set to reconcile the idea of how the spiritual entity in its immateriality could be

subjected to space and time.

Time has its reality in space. Thus space, as it were, is that which is and which owes its existence

to the dialectics of beingness and negation. In this dialectics there is a vision of space as an unmediated

indifference of nature’s being- outside- itself 34

. To be sure, space is an abstract existence which could be

grasped by the multiple points that make it up. For instance, the existence of point A in relation to point B

gives rise to question as to the space and the distance of the two points. The dialectics of Hegel may be

readily seen in his further attempt to expound this further. Points which make up space, according to

Hegel, become the negation of space itself. However, this negation of space does not make it exclusively

out of space rather it remains in it.

Space is outside of itself in the multiplicity of points and these points are without differences.

However space in itself is not a point it is rather punktualitat- punctuality. It is this concept of punctuality

that brings in the correlation between space and time; two concepts which, according to Hegel, are not

different so to speak since the truth of space is time.

Negativity, which relates itself as a point to space and which develops in space its

determinations as line and surface, is, however, just as much for itself in the sphere of

being- outside- itself, and so are its determination therein, though while it is positing as in

the sphere of Being- outside- itself it appears indifferent as regards the things that are

tranquilly side by side. As thus posited for itself, it is time.35

From the above, it is easier to deduce the nature of negativity in relation to time. Hegel believed

that it is the negativity of negativity of space that is time. The reality of space is not immediately given on

its own but it is grasped intuitively by reason. In thinking, there is a synthesis which has undergone the

actions of the thesis and the anti thesis to provide the very notion of space. It is this lack of dormancy or

tranquility of space that time emerges through punctuality- a negation of the negation of space. Time does

not emerge as that which is continually transient. Instead time is an expression of the current.

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i

Hegel quite surprisingly seems to have broken away from the normal concept of duration which

has traditionally suffused the work of the philosophers before him. For him time consists in nothing than

the ‘now’. This concept of steady presence renders the periodic concept of timing (present past and

future) in Hegel’s philosophy retroactive. The now, therefore, becomes the condition for the possibility of

the point’s existing for itself as space. Time reveals itself as an intuited becoming. This underlies the

transition from being to nothing or from nothing to being. Thus the synthesis of both becoming is,

therefore, both a generation and a passing away.

The implication of this to time is simple. The beingness of time is the present such that in all

times there is the now. What we refer to as past is a now that is no- longer and what we refer to as the

future is the now- not- yet therefore not being. Since time is understood as an intuited becoming, there is

nothing that can take it away from the now since every manner of intuiting that brings it forth is present

whether it is past or future. We can, therefore, say about time that it is only the present that exists the

before and after are not; but the concrete present is eternity. 36

The concept of intuition and timeness may have captured much the thought of Henri Bergson

whose keen interest in the metaphysics of time and intuition sought to ask for the possibility of

metaphysics in the presence of relativism, absolute, time and intuition.

The book Introduction to Metaphysics by Bergson re-presented to us what Hegel’s thoughts

attempted to grasp though differently. Explaining the concept of metaphysics, Bergson stated that the

whole existence can be revealed to us through intuition, that is, our own self as it flows in time. This

timeness, for Bergson, is duration. The whole attempt of metaphysics based on the above is to understand

the whole world of beingness of the things which man encounters- the things that surround him.

The analysis of this beingness in the work of Bergson began as an attempt to resolve the subtle

issue in the absolute and relative. The absolute which is the main goal of metaphysics is simple but at the

same time complete. Thus, the analysis of objects is not from the external perspective instead, the

absolute allows us to grasp intuitively something from within, without symbols. Thus

If we compare the various ways of defining metaphysics and conceiving the absolute, we

shall find despite discrepancies that philosophers agree in making a deep distinction….

The first implies going all around it, the second entails entering into it. The first depends

on the viewpoint chosen and the symbols employed while the second is taken from no

view point and rests on no symbol. 37

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ii

The first understanding represents the relative while the latter represents the absolute. However,

the quotation from Bergson brings out another salient point- the stress on ontology. The idea implied from

Bergson here is that the absolute goes into the knowledge of being as it is. The very task of metaphysics is

to grasp by intuition the very nature of things in the universe. Thus if there exists a means of possessing a

reality absolutely, of placing oneself within it instead of adopting points of view towards it, in fact, of

grasping it over and above all expression, metaphysics is that very means.

One reality, however, which we can get to know as it is, is our being as it flows through time. Our

perception of ourselves comes in our sympathizing with ourselves temporally. With the inner regard of

our consciousness, we examine our being in its passivity like some superficial ‘encrustment’. It goes this

way according to Bergson:

First I perceive all perceptions, which come to it from the material world. These

perceptions are clear cut, distinct…. They group themselves into objects…. I

perceive memories as it is detached from my person. I become aware of tendencies,

crowd of virtual actions…. I live in the present too… so I have a more exact image

of my development in duration. 38

Bergson’s idea above pushes out the self as a being which is defined by time. This timeness is

presented to us as duration in our intuition. It can be suggested to us indirectly by images. Duration

constitutes beingness. The point raised by Bergson here seems to form a good front for Heidegger who

attempts to solve the problem of fundamental ontology through temporality. However the functionality of

time in the work of Bergson may not favor the ideas of Martin Heidegger who would no ordinarily

consent to the delineation of intuition as that which grasps the being as being and builds in us the concept

of duration. Heidegger sees the man- Dasein as a being with consciousness.

The introduction of ‘consciousness’ here seems to overrun the intuition of Bergson in the inquiry

into the absolute but makes the works of Edmund Husserl and Soren Kierkegaard, who influenced

Heidegger in their various capacities, relevant at this juncture. One sees in the works of the two below a

stark similarity in their view of man as a conscious being. However, while the consciousness in Husserl

led him to phenomenological reduction and internal timeness, Kierkegaard’s arose in him the concept of

authenticity.

The Concept of Anxiety by Kierkegaard dealt with the place of consciousness in man. According

to him, the very evidence of self consciousness lies in the capability of one singling himself out as an

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individual. This establishment of individuality stems primarily from the very nature of the self as a

synthesis thus:

The self is a relation, which relates itself to is own self, or it is that in

the relation…that the relation relates itself to its own self. Man is a

synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and eternal, of

freedom and necessity…the self is a synthesis. 39

Kierkegaard by the above statement tries to show that the whole world history and concept of

development is geared towards the recognition of the importance of the individual. The principles of

Christianity, according to Kierkegaard, have this vision too since the principles of Christianity are

accessible to all but… provided everyone becomes an individual. 40

Kierkegaard, in the Concept of Anxiety, seems to be worried about the flow of things in the

universe; the way people are terrified of becoming each one of them an individual… when the individual

tries he finds the thought immensely great to ponder. Thus there seems to be a general relaxation of a lot

of people on the comfort zone of collectivity. The author, sequel to this, recommended a general

reformation directed against the ‘masses’ on behalf of the ‘individual’. However he noted that becoming

an individual is not limited to any group but is all encompassing except of course for he who excludes

himself by becoming a ‘crowd’. Each individual is his own centre and the world centers on him. This

entails an existential thinking.

Existential thinking is done by an individual when the individual is concerned about what

meaning the life has and wishes to discover deeper levels of being that transcend reason, conventional

preoccupation. Existential thinking is a mode of consciousness that has left behind the world’s

obsessions- family bill, cars repairs, etc and focuses on making decision with delibrateness, and

awareness about one’s supreme moral obligations- the search for the highest mode of existence.

Kierkegaard’s passion for life of consciousness which is geared towards a transcendence is

discovered in his words that “had I to crave an inscription on my grave I would ask for none other than

the individual- and even if it is not understood now, the in truth it will be”. True self consists in asserting

one’s individualness. The life theme of Kierkegaard’s philosophy lies in the effort to remove the

individual from the crowd. For an individual seeking authenticity, life will not necessarily be a struggle in

which his very existence is at stake; only unflagging vigilance can protect the true self so it can achieve

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its full human potentials. He must constantly make his choices between the truth and falsehood, freedom

and slavery, human existence which is a life of authenticity, fulfillment and truth. Against life of

anonymity, emptiness and collectivity, as determined by group pressures, an unactualizable life and a life

of lower existence. Everyone is given the choice.

This fact reflects more clearly in what seems to be dialectics which he made in the Sickness unto

Death, where he emphasized that the tragic hero renounces himself just to express the universal41

by

accepting for himself the voice of universal reason. By following this voice of universal reason, the

existing individual strives resolutely towards an end which cannot be actualized once and for all at a

given moment and thus is in a constant state of becoming; making himself steadily by his own repeated

choices. The existing individual becomes, for Kierkegaard and actor, not an onlooker he makes his

choices to suit his life designs.

The Concept of Dread by Kierkegaard goes deeper to explain what the life of this individual so

expressed above consists in. Just like Heidegger, who saw dread as a kind of disposition towards death,

Kierkegaard saw dread as having a very close tie with sin. For him, dread is the sympathetic antipathy an

antipathetic sympathy. It is a mixed reaction towards one’s end. An attraction mixed with repulsion,

sympathy and antipathy. A state of dread comes in a situation of uncertainty unlike fear which is definite.

Take a case of a little child, who feels attraction for traveling; a thirst for the prodigious, the mysterious.

42

It is this unknown aspect of the adventure that repels and attracts the small child. Dread is the possibility

of freedom. By this freedom afforded by dread the individual explores the possibilities both of the

negative actions and positive actions and thus choose his path.

The influence of this Kierkegaard’s on Heidegger is enormous. Heidegger from Kierkegaard

developed many concepts ranging from the concept of authenticity, which is found in the Dasein’s

standing out to the concept of transcendence, anxiety and death. The consciousness of the human being,

therefore, makes him a being given the freedom to make a choice of the very life style to lead whether

towards the authentic or inauthentic.

The concept which Heidegger developed especially in his method and even the content of his

work is traceable to Edmund Husserl the predecessor of Heidegger in the University of Freiburg. Husserl

began his theory from the epistemological angle stating:

I have been through enough torments from lack of clarity and doubt that wavers

back and forth… only need absorbs me: I must win clarity, else I cannot live: I

cannot bear life unless I believe that I shall achieve it.43

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i

Husserl believes that the crisis in western culture was as a result of the despair in the achieving

rational certainty; a result of which was irrationalism both at the political and the social spheres. This

irrationalism identified by Husserl for him would produce the negative effect of Nazism.

Philosophically, Husserl explained that our lack of identification of our epistemological

foundation and neglect of the roots of the activities of consciousness misled the field of theoretical

sciences. The field science seems to shield itself from the ‘theoritical origin’ – ‘lebenswelt’ (life world).

This life world is a constituent of totality of meaning.

The idea of the life-world is against naturalism which claims that physical nature encompasses

every real thing and that everything in the ‘real’ world is explainable by the principles of natural sciences.

With this, the issue of consciousness becomes an ‘object’ in nature which is explainable by the laws of

the physical sciences. It is based on this that Husserl set off to achieve a rational certainty, since sciences

cannot establish meaning for human life because they look at the factual world only through objective

theories which, however form and dissolve themselves like fleeting waves.

In his book Philosophy as a rigorous sciences phenomenology and crisis of philosophy, Husserl

proposes a method of his investigation – phenomenological method which seeks to establish a science of

the eidetic essence of a transcendental subjectivity which portrays philosophy as an a priori science44

which stands absolutely on its own ground. This method, so to say, is not a method used to investigate the

contingency of that which is simply there in the world and hence is always conditioned.45

This

phenomenological method was assigned a task by Husserl, a task which not only guides the mind in

testing the rational claim to any truth. We can comfortably link the Husserlian phenomenological method

with that of Hegel’s work before him – phenomenology of the spirit. These two authors understood

phenomenology as a systematic inquiry into the phenomena (that which appears in experience). The

implication of this is that the inquiry into the minds activities starts with the empirical things. This idea

helps them escape the Kantian problem of not being capable of asserting the noumenal world which he

postulated. This phenomenology of Husserl asserts that once there is a tendency to separate phenomena

from reality skepticism is inevitable.

Husserl was prepared to gain a philosophical truth through a phenomenological method which is

‘presuppositionless’ what Husserl meant here was that the thinker should ignore all assumptions which

has not been thoroughly examined. This informs his notion of philosophy as a science of true beginning

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ii

of ultimate origins and a return to the facts themselves46

. Thus the very principle here is as stated by

Husserl that there can be no higher justification for the truth of a claim that ‘what I see that it is so’.

We can immediately inter from the above that Husserl intends that we take a certain position in

looking into experiences. Hence, any sort of pre-phenomenological experience is characterized by a

‘natural standpoint’ which is based on rough and implicit assumptions and which is detrimental to our

acquisition of pure knowledge. To assist in clearing off this presumption, Husserl developed a point of

departure for phenomenology through bracketing by postulating that the phenomenologist who follows

the rigorous requirements of a first philosophy must suspend the world, himself included47

. What this

means is that the philosopher must disregard the remote belief in the ‘theoritico-objective’ understanding

of the world and suspend all judgment about the world48

.

By the above the phenomenological method changes the world from what it is to what it should

be. This introspective methodology in which one turns oneself as a passive, non-worldly observer of the

natural world is identified by Husserl as phenomenological epoche. The epoche is a total rejection of

natural knowledge as objective. With this, there is an explicit reduction of the real world into the eidetic

structures of transcendental subjectivism where in lies an objectivity which is self evidence and inquire no

justification. This phenomenological analysis explains the world which we perceive implicitly, explicit

without tampering with the phenomena as it is. Husserl state:

This cannot be emphasized often enough – phenomenal explication does nothing but

explicate the sense this world has for us all prior to any philosophizing and obviously

gets solely from our experiences a sense which philosophy can uncover but never alter49.

One thing that arises significantly in the phenomenology of Husserl is that by bracketing the

world through epochs, consciousness no longer comes after the background of experience instead it

comes prior to the mind’s reflective awareness. When one is besought by natural attitude, there is a very

little possession of self awareness since one attends only to the objects of self experience. Thus at the

absence of such natural attitude by bracketing, there is a rediscovery of the consciousness and its

functionality.

This consciousness so mentioned does not have a semblance of an object so there is no discovery

of metaphysical substances upon the examination of the consciousness. The consciousness, according to

Husserl, is a certain structure which is explainable apart from its particular contents. Thus the conscious is

a series of awareness that stands always in relation to some objects. Thus to be conscious entails a

consciousness of something. The above assigns the function of intuiting the world to consciousness. This

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iii

function so assigned to the consciousness is what Husserl is not tilted towards an act of the will through

which an action is performed (having a ploy or move towards perpetration of an action). It is instead, a

disposition of consciousness towards an object which it is conscious of in intention the things in the world

appear as a phenomena continuously present and as correlates of consciousness50

.

However, these correlates are not just particularly identifiable but by its logico-phenomenal

existence, it is the spatio- temporal world (an idea inspired by Descartes res-extenza and which in turn

formed a social ground for Heidegger to have built his idea of the world-hood of the world). This Spatio-

temporal world is suspended and yet reduced to a being of intentionality – Being for consciousness51

. The

consciousness, in brief, creates a unity for natural philosophies by synthesizing the world unto one

transcendental whole, discovers it and constitutes it.

With the postulation of the ‘consciousness’ there came upon the work of Husserl a radical

touched which made his position seemingly hard to place. Shortly after his postulations of the

consciousness, there was swift shift to the personification of the conscious in the transcendental ego. This

transcendental ego became a kind of the beginning and end of the world consciousness and knowledge

itself. In his work the Cartesian meditations, Husserl tried to account for the existence of the objects in the

world thus:

Objects exist for me and are for me what they are only as objects of actual and

possible consciousnesss.52

The above appeared to have a double faced interpretation. In the first place, for an object to exist

for one and be what it is ‘for one’ shows a subjective understanding of the world. This goes back to the

Protagoras’ concept in his book the truth where he sees man as he subject viewer of the world – the

measure of all things. Thus the objects of the world by the above understanding of Husserl are dependent

on the transcendental ego – consciousness. This landed him into pure idealism. The second interpretation

could be lighter. This second interpretation follows a Kantian concept in the critique of pure Reason in

which the mind elicits meaning from the world objects. Thus we can understand the idea of Husserl as

‘that it is through consciousness’ that things in the world are made meaningful.

The place of Martin Heidegger following the above is no longer hidden. The concept of

phenomenology by Martin Heidegger is such that there is an independent existence of the phenomenal

world from the mind. The mind allows things to show themselves to it as they are apophainestai. This

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x

phenomenological method no doubt formed the basis of Heidegger’s ontology. It is therefore not

surprising seeing most of the ideas of Husserl in Heidegger’s work even when the very terminology is

not used by Heidegger as we can see in care of Heidegger and the internal time consciousness of Husserl,

Dasein of Heidegger and the transcendental ego, and so on.

Evidently, the Husserlian influence on Heidegger was so enormous that Heidegger’s concepts in

which the analysis of being was made became either a response to Husserl’s disourses or an analysis of

same. Some thinker like Kisiel, and Robert, therefore, believed that the dedication of the Being and Time

by Martin Heidegger to Husserl was an evidence of a subordinate scholarship on the part of Heidegger to

Husserl.

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Endnotes

1. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time trans by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York:

Harper and Row pub. 1962), 21

2. Plato, Phaedo in philosophic classics trans by Walter Kaufmann (USA: Prentice-hall 1963), 149

3. Plato, 431.

4. Plato, 433.

5. Plato, 442.

6. Plato, 153.

7. Martin Heidegger, 129.

8. Plato, Timaeus in philosophic classics trans by Walter Kaufmann (USA: Prentice-hall 1963) p.149

9. Plato, 149

10. Plato, 442.

11. Plato, 442.

12. Aristotle, Categories in Philosophic Classic trans by Walter Kaufmann (USA: Prentice-hall 1963),

367

13. Aristotle, 368

14. Aristotle, Metaphysics in Philosophic Classic trans by Walter Kaufmann (USA: Prentice-hall 1963)

p.409

15. Aristotle, 415

16. Aristotle, 420

17. Aristotle, 409

18. Heidegger, Being and Time, 39

19. Augustine, Confessions, 80.

20. Augustine, 92.

21. Augustine, 90.

22. Augustine, 87.

23. Thomas Aquinas Summa Theologica (ed) T. Gill etal. (London: Black Friars and Eyre &Spottis

woods 1975), xxxvii.

24. Thomas Aquinas, xxxv.

25. Rene Descartes, Meditations on first philosophy transl. by E. Anscombe P.T. Geach (London:

Thomas Nelson and sons Ltd 1969), 64.

26. Descartes, 67.

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27. Heidegger, 42

28. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason trans Kemp Smith (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press ltd. 1967),

24

29. Kant, 110

30. Fredrick Hegel, Reason in History transl by William Wallace (Oxford: Claredon press 1971), 158-

159.

31. Charles Taylor, Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University press 1975), 127-128.

32. Fredrick Hegel, Science of Logic transl by William Wallace (Oxford: Claredon press 1971), 39

33. Fredrick Hegel, Phenomenology of the Spirit transl by Hermann (London: Stuttgart 1928), 658.

34. Fredrick Hegel, Philosophy of Nature transl by Hermann (London Stuttgart 1928), 220.

35. Fredrick Hegel, 198.

36. Fredrick Hegel, 200.

37. Henri Bergson, Introduction to metaphysics, 18

38. Henri Bergson, 22

39. Henri Bergson, 37

40. Soren Kierkegaard, Concept of Anxiety transl. by Lowry (London 1944), 126.

41. Soren Kierkegaard, Concept of Dread transl. by Lowry (London 1944), 132

42. Soren Kierkegaard, 137.

43. See Herbert Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological movement (2nd

ed) (The Hague: Nijjhof 1965), 1:82.

44. Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General introduction to pure phenomenology transl. Boyce Gibson (London

1976,), 13, 20

45. Edmund Husserl, Philosophy as a Rigorous Science transl Quentin Lauer (New York 1965), 116.

46. Edmund Husserl Ideas: General introduction to pure phenomenology ,82

47. Edmund Husserl, 188

48. Philip Windsor, Reason and History or only History of reason ed. (Britain: Leicester University Press

1990), 93

49. Edmund Husserl, Cartesian mediations trans. Dorion Carins (Hague: Nijhoff 1960), 151.

50. Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General introduction to pure phenomenology, 144.

51. Edmund Husserl, 153.

52. Edmund Husserl, Cartesian mediations, 65.

53. Edmund Husserl, 67

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CHAPTER THREE

ANALYSIS OF THE ONTOLOGICAL DECONSTRUCTION.

3.1 THE BIOGRAPHY OF MARTIN HEIDEGGER

Heidegger was one of the most controversial philosophers of the 20th century. His works

contributed immensely to the growth of phenomenology, metaphysics, existentialism and hermeneutics.

His main concern was ontology or the study of being. This was laid bare in his Being and Time where he

attempted to analyze being through the means of phenomenological analysis of human existence in

respect to its temporal and historical character. He further tried to fight back to ground the feet of

metaphysics which he accused his predecessors of suspending by their forgetfulness of being. With the

above, he made the question of being paramount to his metaphysics.

Born in 1889 in Messkirch, South-west Germany to a catholic family, his early life became a

preparation towards the priestly life. His dream to the priestly life was however shattered by his constant

illness which the call does not demand. As a result of lack of strong spiritual vocation coupled with this

poor health, he pulled away facing a different pattern of life which was to be his point of success

eventually in 1911. His education and long term training led him to a new system of thought which he

showed forth as a cornerstone to his thought. He confirmed his biography thus:

I, Martin Heidegger, was born on September 26, 1889, at Messkirch (Baden) as the son of

Friedrich Heidegger, Sexton and cellarer, and his wife Johanna, born Kempf, both of

Catholic religion. After having attended the public school in my home town, I studied at the

Gymnasium of Konstanz from 1903 until 1906, and after the third year I transferred to the

Berthold- Gymnasium in the Freiburg-im-Breisgau. During the first two years I attended

lectures in philosophy and theology. After 1911 I concentrated mostly on philosophy,

mathematics and the natural sciences, during the last semester I added history1.

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His intellectual romance with the German nihilism especially in the philosophical thoughts of

Nietzsche, Schelling, Hegel, and even Kant, formed the influences that guided his thoughts and the main

foundation of his philosophy. Having, further, learnt from The Manifold Meaning of being according to

Aristotle by Franz Brentano, his interest in philosophy was fully enkindled. He, further, studied Husserl’s

work on the logical investigations. In 1913 he completed his doctorate degree in philosophy with the title

The Doctrine of Judgment in Psychologism under Heinrich Rickert, a neo-Kantian philosopher.

Hoping to take up the chair of philosophy at the catholic university of Freiburg, he tried to beef- up

his works on Duns Scotus’ Doctrine of Categories and Meaning, a work which earned him the

qualification to teach in the university. He saw another turning point of his philosophical career in his

meeting with Edmund Husserl, who came new to the University of Freiburg. When this encounter led him

to announce his break with the system of Catholicism, he was appointed Husserl’s assistant in 1919 where

he started his new and insightful method of teaching. His teachings on phenomenology and his creative

interpretations of Aristotle earned him great popularity. He was not very much influenced by his master

Husserl; in short, he was not a faithful follower of Husserl. Being interested in the question of things

themselves, he soon began to radically reinterpret Husserl’s Phenomenology.

By 1923, Martin Heidegger moved to Marburg University where he obtained the position of

Associate Professor thanks to Paul Natrop. The originality of his work and insight made him popular, but

since he lacked publications, he could not be promoted. In February 1927, his major treatise, though

unfinished, Being and Time was published, a work which, in the fall of 1927, earned him the professorial

seat. This work though dedicated to Husserl spelt out completely the divergence between him and

Edmund Husserl and his further steps outside the bounds of neo-Kantianism and phenomenology of

consciousness to his phenomenological ontology.

With the rise of Adolf Hitler to power, the status of Heidegger changed. With the appointment of

Hitler as the chancellor of the Marburg University, Heidegger rose to the post of the rector of the

University, having joined the NSDA party which became Hitler’s party and the second largest party in

Germany. He claimed that he accepted the position to prevent the political hijack of the University. His

work on the self-affirmation of the German university, being his rectoral inaugural lecture, was

interpreted as an expression of support of Hitler’s regime. He became instrumental to Nazi policies and

thus helped transform the University into a National – socialist mode.

Having resigned in 1924 from rectorship position, his inaugural lecture was found to be

incompatible with the party line and thus was banned by the Nazis. His works, afterwards, especially in

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the 1930s and 1940s, portrayed a court criticism of Nazi ideology. In 1944 he was declared expendable

and thus sent to the Rine to dig trenches. When Germany lost in war in 1945, Martin Heidegger was

forbidden to teach and thus in 1946 he was dismissed because of alleged Nazi sympathies. The barn was

lifted in 1949.

In the 1930s, the works of Martin Heidegger exposed less systematic and more obscure writing

against the Being and Time. It was towards the end of the 1930’s and early 1940’s that his reflection upon

western philosophical tradition and an endeavor to open a space for philosophizing outside it brought him

to pre-Socratic thought which was reflected in his ‘An Introduction to metaphysics’, where his earlier and

later positions were clearly spelt clear. During the last three decades of his life, Heidegger published

much works compared to the earlier decades. He addressed different issues concerning modernity and

attempted to clarify his way of thinking even though not much effect was recorded from these later works.

Heidegger tried to justify, during the last part of his life, his involvement in the Nazi regime in the

interview with Des Spiegel entitled ‘Only God can save us’, documentary published only ten years after

his death. Heidegger died on the 26th day of May 1976 and was buried in Messkirch at the Churchyard.

3.2 Heidegger and Dasein Analytic:

Heidegger began his philosophy as a reaction against traditional metaphysics which seemed to have

thrown away the very foundational question which would have served as a stepping stone to all research.

This foundational question was the question of being. This question of being, Heidegger lamented, has

been long forgotten despite its important role in the research of the ancient philosophers Plato and

Aristotle. He stated thus:

This question has today been forgotten. Even though in our time we deem it

progressive to give our approval to Metaphysics again, it held that we have been

exempted from the exertions of a newly rekindled question about being. Yet the

question we are touching upon is not just any question. It is one which has provided

stimulus for the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle only to subside from then on as a

theme for actual investigation… and what they wrested with the utmost intellectual

effort from the phenomena, fragmentary and incipient though it was, has long since

become trivialized.2

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The desire of Heidegger since this discovery became deepened as he sought more and more to

answer the question of being and, in fact, study beingness in general. To study beingness, according to

Martin Heidegger, consists primarily in destroying previous ontologies. In the section six (§6) of his work

Being and Time, he set out the modality of this destruction which he built around Dasein. Heidegger

rightly observed that all researches both in the sciences and even those that centre on the question of

being are within the ontical nature of Dasein. This ontical nature/possibility of Dasein means that Dasein

is a being whose beingness is an issue; that is, that Dasein as a being tries always to understand itself.

This very understanding of itself exposes to Dasein its temporality (a being within timeness).

Primarily, one traces the word Da-sein, etymologically from the German being-there. This is

quite distinct from another usage which Heidegger made of similar word the das-sein meaning ‘is that’ or

‘the is’. The word Dasein is traced from the infinitive ‘wes’-to be and finally the substantive ‘sein’-Being

which Heidegger emphasized most. Taking up the intifitive and the substantive from as we see in the

Introduction to metaphysics, there are three grammatical forms which determine the nature and the

behavior of the world in question-Being. The historical structure of this word is located in the Sanskrit

language, Greek and Latin languages. Heidegger located the oldest of this in the ancient Sanskrit

language ‘-es’ meaning life or leaving as declined from the world ‘asus’. The verbal formation of this

word takes its root from ‘esmi’ or ‘esi’ which is likened to the Greek ‘eimi’ or ‘einai’ and the Latin

infinitive ‘esse’. He equally analyzed ‘being’ as that which emerges using ‘bhu’ or ‘bheu’ corresponding

to the Greek word ‘phuo.’ From here, Heidegger derived his ‘wes’-to dwell being the inflection of his

cherished ‘sein’.

The above analysis of being by Martin Heidegger showed forth his entire concept of man, as a

being with life, a being that exists and dwells in the universe; hence the last word from the ancient

German ‘wes’- to dwell. In the first place, Dasein’s Sanskrit root shows it as a being in the world, a being

that lives in the world with the consciousness of its existence. This first meaning gives a lead to the

second ‘emerge’ in which the being in question is thrown into the world whose reality develops through

time by its emergence. The third designates the ontic and ontological function of Dasein as he

understands itself and other beings ready- at- hand and the world as a whole as an ontico- ontological

existent.

The above etymological derivatives of the Heidegger’s description of Dasein further represent the

very nature of Dasein and its structure of beingness in the universe. The ontic nature/possibility of Dasein

is the very nature which distinguishes it from the other beings to the extent that it is a being whose

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beingness is an issue for it. Being ontic, it sees itself as itself; a being who understands itself and strives to

embrace its existentiell (The existentiell so called is seen in the Dasein’s mineness in which one is faced

with the freedom of choice of an inauthentic or authentic life by acceptance death as one’s own- most-

possibility or by choosing to live the life of the crowd). The ontic distinction of Dasein lies in the fact that

Dasein is ontological. Being ontological, Dasein has its function as understanding of other beings in the

universe- existenz. Thus the question of existence is one of Dasein. The explanation of the ontic and

ontological entity portrays Dasein as a being within timeness. This is seen in its everyday transcendence

into the future, the facticity.

Heidegger established that temporality is the condition which makes for the meaningfulness of

beings and in fact, makes historicality possible in the first place and as such the world history. He writes:

Historicality as that, which determines Dasein, makes history possible.

Historicality stands for the state of being that is constitutive for Dasein’s

historizing as such; only on the basis of such historizing is anything like world

history possible or can anything belong historically to world- history.3

Dasein apparently dictates for itself its life as a temporal entity. It sees itself as factual- a being

of the past. This being of the past makes it possible for Dasein to look into its life as a being in the future.

This continuous vision gives Dasein a regimented vision about itself as a being in time. This becomes a

traditional vision of Dasein of itself. In this, the past is not seen as that which has gone never to return but

as something which already goes ahead of it.

However, the primary historicality (man as a being of temporality) of Dasein as a person is not

given to it immediately. That is, the personal life of one within time as the uncertainty of the future

portends, is not graspable by man himself. But through the discovery of tradition and inquiring into it

Dasein brings itself into what the future would look like owing to the examination of the history before

him. But if this discovery of history is denied man, it serves not as evidence against his actual reality but

an evidence of lack of history.

The inquiry into the meaning of being must be carried out by primarily understanding the nature

of Dasein as both a being of temporality and the being of historicality. However, the interpretation of

Dasein’s structure shows that it is so tied to world and thus sees itself at the mercy of tradition which it

takes hold of. This tradition in question seems to limit man’s quest for going deeper into the inquiry of the

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remote past by its concealment and therefore denies it of the understanding of the primary conditions

which will enable delve into the remote past to understand it.

When the tradition becomes a master, it does so in such a way that what it transmits is

made inaccessible proximally and for the most part that it rather becomes concealed.

Tradition takes what has come down to us and delivers it over to self evidence; it

blocks our access to those primordial sources from which the categories and concepts

handed down to us have been quite genuinely drawn.4

Dasein’s understanding of itself or the beings in general is in terms of the world. Thus for this to

be clear enough, there is need for the question of being to have its own transparent history in which the

concealment of tradition is removed and tradition itself, which is so hardened loosened. This continues

until we arrive at the primordial experiences which lead us to the real nature of being.

The very concept of Dasein’s analysis consists in the very need to answer the question of

meaning and is the main issue in philosophy, which has been forgotten by previous philosophers. For this

to be successfully achieved, the previous ontologies must have to be destroyed since they ignored the very

substance of the ontological analysis following from tradition which has concealed being from Dasein

and have failed to analyze this Dasein so represented in terms of temporality. The above thesis by Martin

Heidegger leads him to his method in which Dasein stands out and with the loosening out of the hard

tradition and breaking open the concealment, it allows things to show forth themselves as Dasein

understands them following its traditional historicity. Let us therefore take a look at the

phenomenological method of Heidegger.

3.3 Heidegger and Hermeneutico-Phenomenological

Methodology:

Heidegger’s explanations and ontological deconstruction would be better understood in his search

for an appropriate methodology with which to carry out his research. Primarily, Heidegger accused the

traditional metaphysics of the forgetfulness of being and the mystification of metaphysics. Thus he set out

to make a novel explanation of being. Having come in contact with Husserl, he found in his ‘logical

investigation’, a novel methodology with which to analyze this problem of ontology. Thus, he chose

phenomenology, a method aimed at the conceptual meanings of each phenomenon. He aimed at a

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phenomenological analysis of human existence in respect to his historical and temporal character, thus his

inquiry into the meaning of being.

This methodology used in the Being and Time by Heidegger was primarily set out in his

Introduction to the Book of Aristotle. In this document there is an evidence of basic concepts that would

take the center stage in the Being and Time. This hermeneutico- phenomenological method would be used

by Heidegger for the investigation of the basic issues in existence. This methodology would further make

a distinction between the developments of a fundamental ontology and the destruction of the history of

metaphysics on another. This, Heidegger believed, will lead to new ontological way of access to the

temporality of human existence.

Before we go further, we must understand Heidegger’s notion of phenomenology. Husserl, who

introduced phenomenology in the contemporary thought, fronted phenomenology as a science of

consciousness and its objects. This was not divorced from the Cartesian tradition. Heidegger, on his part,

paid attention to many different modes in which we exist and encounter reality; he called this disclosure

of being. Heidegger following this, made an analysis of the structures that constitute things not only as

they are encountered in the disposition of consciousness which is made manifest in its detachment and

theoretical attitude but equally in the day to day encounter of being as ‘Zuhandene’- utensils and even in

some special moods that being finds itself especially in Angst- anxiety. This is why he prescribed

phenomenology as the most suitable method for ontology. He said:

Phenomenology must be the method of ontology and that phenomenology can fully

justify the scientificity of ontology. Ontology must apply the phenomenological method

in order to be capable of being a genuine science5.

Heidegger further demonstrates the structures that are constitutive of the peculiar kind of being

which he called ‘Dasein’. He emphasized that it is not pure consciousness in which beings are originally

made of. Thus, the starting point of philosophy, for him, is not consciousness but Dasein in its being.

Using this as the base, he tried primarily to differentiate phenomenology from theology and other

dogmatic disciplines. Thus phenomenology instead received new meaning from Heidegger. He sees it

more broadly and more etymologically as letting what shows itself to be seen from itself he declares:

The term phenomenology is quite different from theology. . . Those terms

designate the objects of their respective science according to the subject-matter

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which they comprise at the time. Phenomenology neither designates the object

of its researches nor characterizes the subject-matter thus comprised. . . it merely

informs us of the how with which what is to be treated in this science gets

exhibited and handled. . . it entails letting what shows itself to be seen from

itself6.

Heidegger takes phenomenology to designate a method. Since he saw philosophy as ontology and

has being as its theme, he could not have adopted the methodology of this problem from any actual

science. The method of ontology for Heidegger is phenomenology. It is the way of accessing what is to

become the theme of ontology. To say in brief, Being is grasped by means of the method of

phenomenology. Being is always that which underlies a being and therefore, Being becomes accessible

only through the existing entities. This accounts for the ambiguity of being.

This aspect of Heidegger’s work is made clearer in his discussion of readiness-to-hand.

Something is ready-to-hand when it is a tool in the broad sense of it; when something is made for a

particular purpose. A being can function as a tool, therefore, only when it is seen as belonging to a context

of serving the purpose of means and ends. This issue of ready-to-hand manifests itself clearly in the

attempt to answer the question of being, a task which is particular to Dasein as both ontic, ontological and

even an ontico- ontological being. Thus Heidegger saw the need for the phenomenological explanation of

the world- existenz, which helps to articulate the understanding of being generally and Dasein in

particular.

With the introduction of the ‘world’, in his discourse of being, his concept of intentionality of

being becomes a kind of comportment of beings to the world. This comportment is made possible only on

the basis of a directedness that is precisely not towards other entities/beings but towards the world. When

this comportment is channeled towards the world there is some sort of transcendence of any particular

thing7. Sequel to this, the necessity of ‘phenomenological reduction’ becomes explicit. The world is not

any particular entity, it is a means by which Dasein can give itself to understanding entities it comports

itself to;

As a totality, world is no particular entity but rather, that by means of and in terms of

which Dasein gives itself to understand what entities it can comport itself to and how it

can do so.8

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Thus, when Dasein is aware of entities which it can approach and apprehend as against the things

it relates to at a given time and of what steps, which would be taken to reach them, it is as a result of

Dasein’s understanding of the world as a whole. Thus the world is seen as a transcendental concept. The

awareness of the world is given ontologically to the knowing subject- Dasein. But Dasein is in every case

what it can be. We must understand Heidegger more clearly here. The world ‘Dasein’ was not primarily

used as being synonymous with man but Being in general. The word seems to be customized to man in

Being and Time of the role assigned to man in the work, the role of answering the question of Being.

This was clearly understood as he pointed out that the world is the projection of one’s own

possibilities. The possibilities hereof are not eternal to these knowing subjects. Dasein always goes

beyond itself as being towards the potentiality for – being which it is itself6. One, ipso facto, cannot

explain or define Dasein without the possibilities. Suffice it to say that Dasein cannot be said to have a

world without seeing its power of being always transcendent over itself to actualize its possibility. By this

fact, we could surmise that Heidegger’s phenomenology centers on the fact that the idea of the world is

captured by Dasein who lets the other beings as ready-to-hand show themselves as they are and in turn

exposes Dasein’s possibility to it. This being the case, both the world and Dasein imply each other.

We must not, however, lose sight of the fact that the etymological explanation of phenomenology

Heidegger him a great insight to the choice of this methodology thus λεγειν τα φαινωμενα (laying out the

phenomena). He saw ‘λεγειν’ here as laying out, exhibiting, setting forth etc. We could see logos as

reason which makes activities possible. Logos, however, can also mean that which is laid out, set forth.

Taking from here, we could assume Logos to be substance- ύποκειμηνον (Hypokeimenon) to which one

addresses oneself and which one discusses; we could see it as that which lies at the bottom of what is

exhibited or told (Zum Grunde) and thus it becomes the ground (Grund) or reason for saying anything

whatever. However, we must understand that whatever is said is said in relation to something as a matter

of fact. Thus the Logos as legomenon stand not astride but in relation to other things (Bwziehund and

Verhaltruis)9. We could, in the final analysis, explain phenomenology as ‘Apophainesthai’ – seeing things

from themselves in the way they show themselves.

In this explanation we must understand first of all what there is to show. Heidegger explained that

if the formal conception of phenomenon is to be subsumed into the phenomenological and if the

phenomenon would be distinguished from the ordinary conception, and further, if we must go into

attempting to understand what must be called phenomenon and what it lets us to see, we must deconstruct

the things that proximally do not show itself; something that lies hidden as against that, which shows

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itself. However, that which does not show itself belongs to the category of beings which themselves are

so essentially self evident as to constitute their meaning and grounds for their existence. Heidegger called

that which lies hidden in disguise the ‘Being of entities’.

In establishing this point, Heidegger appeared to state the problem of his discourse on being

saying that because of the hidden nature of being “being is forgotten and no questions raised about it or

about its meaning”10

. Therefore, what phenomenology takes up as its object is the demands that the study

of being become a phenomenon in the distinctive sense and its terms of its own most content.

By this fact, it is evident that it is phenomenology that serves as a path way through which being

is accessed. Thus it is only as phenomenological explanation that we consider ‘Being’, its meaning,

modifications and derivatives. Beyond being there is nothing else. The need for phenomenology

accordingly arises when it is clear that the phenomenon is quite undiscovered or that it is neither known

nor unknown or even that a phenomenon can be buried over ( it was discovered before but at length the

discovery got defoliated, and thus is covered up again). By and large, that task of phenomenology is to lay

bare the primordial manners of being upon which the being-sense “present-at-hand is founded”. Ipso fact,

the reality must necessarily be bracketed or suspended or reduced.

This reduction is because the phenomenological desire is to reveal the phenomenal being-sense of

reality itself. For Heidegger, phenomenology should not be interpreted as a philosophical operation which

denies any form of access to pure and worldless subjectivity but however, this reduction is to be viewed

as an attempt to interpret the relationship of man to his own world from within that inter-relationship. By

this fact, the totality of the present-at-hand (world) must be put out of play so that the world, (die

weltlichkeit der welt – worldhood of the world) itself can become a phenomenon available for description.

We must understand at this juncture, that if man remains in the world, then no reduction will ever make

man step out outside his own relationship with the world into this worldless subjectivity as indicated

earlier. To step back from reality does not entail withdrawing beyond the world, instead it implies

stepping back from one relationship to the world into a more transcendental relationship, which is more

foundational.

Thus, Heidegger stresses that phenomenology, per se, should be understood as ‘hermeneutics’.

We cannot think of employing the tenets of phenomenology in philosophy without ‘presuppositions in as

much as all philosophy as a way of development of man’s inter-relationship with the world presupposes

man’s definitive involvement in the world. Suffice it to say that phenomenology can only be the self-

explication of man’s own being in the world; phenomenology can never escape the phenomenological

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circle. Therefore, since Heidegger rejects the possibility of basing phenomenology on any worldless

subjectivity, this must then be provided by man’s being in the world. Thus, man serves as the gateway to

the understanding of being.

Man (Dasein) is that being for which its own being (sein) is an issue (ontic possibility). Man, a

being already-in, has an understanding of being (sein-verstandnis). The above understanding of man

forms a background or foundation for the emergence of whatever else that occupies man as a task in the

world (welt). Based on this, phenomenology as hermeneutics is no more than the thematic development of

an understanding, which is already definitive of man. Also, the act whereby the phenomenologist puts the

totality of beings out of play in order that the being of beings may be revealed for description is nothing

but the making explicit of the fundamental concern of man, in so far as man is that being for whom there

can first be a world and beings in the world 11

.

This position of Heidegger is closely tied with the Max Scheler’s position in which Scheler

explained that the uniqueness of man’s life lies in his capacity to oppose reality with an ‘emphatic No’.

Man, Scheler believed, is the being who can de-actualize or de-realize reality and this de-realization is the

necessary condition for the appearance of objects (Gegenstande) which stand in opposition to man.

Therefore, the de-realization of reality is what first makes possible the emergence of objective truth,

science, philosophy and whatever is distinctively human12

. To say the least, phenomenology is the

hermeneutics of being in the world.

Through this being in the world, the context of significance which is the world itself is first and

foremost disclosed and every other being comes to be manifest in experience which must occur within

this context. Now, since man’s way of being is precisely being in the world, the understanding of Dasein

is already a hermeneutics of the being both of the world and other beings. No wonder, Martin Heidegger

in his ‘Being and Time’ and some of the subsequent works of his insisted that the question of being

(seinsfrage) is automatically the question of man and vice-versa. This explains the relationship that exists

between man and being. The very issue of examinations is precisely being as a relationship. In this, the

world is disclosed, therefore, providing the context of significance within which inner worldly being are

made manifest or are disclosed.

But phenomenology aims at describing being from within man’s relationship with the world. The

self- conscious motivation behind this description is the desire to disclose the very foundation upon which

all man’s worldly activities especially those activities which constitute science and philosophy is built. To

accomplish this task, the phenomenologist must disengage himself from his own worldly activities even

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though Sartre maintained that the phenomenological reduction could be possible and pure only when it is

spontaneously and absolutely carried out without any motivation13

.

Nevertheless, Heidegger still believed that this motivation is necessary and must surely come

from the phenomenologist himself and from his involvement in the world in such a way that all efforts

towards disengagement from and description of the world must remain shrouded by such involvement. In

the final analysis the phenomenologist often finds his description of the worldly activity partly ‘corrupted’

(rendered impure) by his own worldly motivation.

Accordingly, the phenomenological description and reduction can stand revealed as concrete

possibilities for man only in so far as something in man’s contemporary being in the world calls for such

phenomenological response from man14

. For any philosophical question to arise, man’s contextual

preoccupation with his everyday affairs must somehow be broken down. Some events within such

everyday involvement in the world must bring man up casting him out of the familiar context of his

concerns. By this fact it becomes clear that philosophy can lay no legitimate claim to any absolute

knowledge or truth independent of the concrete historical disclosure of being (sein) through man.

The unfolding of a change in man’s relationship to the world does not occur despite man’s

activity. It works itself out through the activities of men, giving those activities the meaning they possess.

In brief, the meaning of phenomenology for Martin Heidegger does not actually lie in the activities or

even the consciousness of the phenomenologist, rather, on the thing itself. Therefore the turn in the inter-

relationship between man and other things is not any new thing but it is the oldest of the old. Thus the

turn of man as being in the world represents man’s return to himself such that the particular event through

which both man and the world hold their origin is actually what we can identify as de-realization or a

stepping back an activity which forms the very concern of phenomenology.

3.4 The Dasein and Existence

The dawn of Heidegger’s philosophy, which stretched over a half of his academic career

as a teacher and scholar, was focused on the question of being. The source of this expressly is

fully based on the influence of Franz Brentano’s work on the Manifold Meaning of Being in

Aristotle. This influence is made manifest in the question which Heidegger raised in his What is

Metaphysics: why is there something instead of nothing at all? This question guided him

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systematically into the study of Being. The question of being which remained unanswered during

his time became the leading question in his work ‘the Being and Time. Through the history of

being in philosophy, Heidegger noticed that in the philosophical tradition it has been

presupposed that being is one of the most universal concepts and at the same time very

ambiguous. The concept of being is practically indefinable in terms of other concepts, and the

self-evident concept. To say the least, the concept of being is generally taken for granted. Based

on this understanding, the meaning of being is hidden. It is based on this that the raising of the

question of being becomes a task which is very necessary.

In accordance with the phenomenological method which he employed before attempting

to provide an answer to the question of being in general, Heidegger went into answering the

question of being of a kind of entity which he saw as the gate way to being. This entity is

Dasein- being there (the words ‘being there’ were derived from the etymology of Da- sein).

However, the nature of being which is understood through Dasein seems absurd in the

Aristotelian ontology since it appears to denote ‘nothing’. To say the least, searching for the

meaning of being based on the theory on the ontology outlined in Aristotle’s work generally is

abstruse. We must aptly attempt to dissociate Heidegger’s concept of being from that of Aristotle

which, as it were, lacks history and thus meaning. The Heidegger’s understanding of being

represents an existence which adapts itself to the worldhood of the world.

These entities which are ready-to- hand are understood by Dasein. Heidegger in

explaining out Dasein gave it the role of consciousness which makes it a particular kind of

being- the human person. In fact Heidegger did not mince words in the attempt to explain Dasein

in relation to us and arrogated the existential function of analyzing beingness to us. He said:

We are ourselves, the entities to be analyzed. The Being of any such entity is in each case

mine. These entities, in their Being, comport themselves towards their Being. As entities

with such being, they are delivered over to their own Being. Being is that which is an

issue for every such entity.15

In as much as Heidegger presented to us as being that is historical and has a focus in that

they are delivered over to their own being, the meaningfulness of being is made manifest in the

analysis of being itself. Heidegger attempted to show the full meaning of being. He, ipso facto,

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distinguished Being essentially from beings. This distinction, according to Martin Heidegger, is

very fundamental. It is the oblivious of this that brought about the forgetfulness of being which

Heidegger accused the western metaphysics of.

To sort out this problem of forgetfulness of being which Heidegger accused his

predecessors of, he presented common sense solution that is, stating that since we are not outside

Being and able to stand in relation to it as we do to an object of thought, we shall have to proceed

indirectly by examining particular types of existents. Thus, if being is mentioned, one

understands species and genius. This idea, Heidegger thought, was improper stressing that this

was Aristotle’s fault. Thus instead of hanging his explanations on Plato’s ontological

explanation, he saw the need, to put the problem of being on a new basis. To say, according to

Heidegger, that being is the most universal concept does not entail its being the clearest or that it

requires no other recitation. Here, we must see beings as the darkest of all which discloses itself

in history.

On the other hand, Heidegger saw being as an entity which is not definable, it is deduced

from its supreme universality.16

Being, as it were, is not to be seen as an entity of its own (ens

non additur aliqua natura) rather being cannot be derived from higher concepts by definition,

nor can it be presented through lower ones. This does not erase the profound problem which

being offers us. Our knowledge of the fact that being does not have the character of an entity is

by inference the principle of definition (as we have in traditional logic) which may not favorably

be applied to the explanation or understanding of Being. Heidegger, nevertheless, made us

understand that this issue of the indefineability of being does not render being meaningless.

Instead it imbues in us the challenge to look at the problem of the question of being at the face.

Heidegger further came up with the third and seemingly the most controversial

presupposition saying that being of all concepts is self evident by its usage. This is so to the

extent that being is made manifest in our daily activities. Thus he stated:

Whenever one cognizes anything or makes an assertion, whenever one

comports oneself towards entities even towards itself some use of

Being is made and this expression is held to be intelligible without

further ado…17

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This does not mean a contradiction of his understanding of being as being the darkest. By

his understanding, being by its meaning is not very simple to analyze but by it presence and

phenomenological recognition, is self- evident. Understanding the above is very simple

according to Martin Heidegger. So as people understand the statement the sun is hot, I am

hungry and so on, so the nature of being itself evident. Nevertheless, at this level we are handed

with an average kind of understanding. This average understanding merely shows the intelligible.

This is to say, that if a being comports itself towards entities, there is primarily a mystery; in

encountering of being, being is veiled or hidden in the dark. Thus raising the question again

becomes justified since it is in raising this question that beingness is revealed.

Understanding this leaves a seeming negativity with us since there appears to be no

answer to the question of being. Even the raising of the question itself appears obscure. But we

are aware that we must search for the meaning of being and any inquiry regarding this must be

guarded by the meaning of being before hand. This suggests that the meaning of being is some

how open to us before hand. This meaning is traceable to Dasein through which the

meaningfulness of being is made possible.

Dasein could be generally accepted to connote the mode of existence akin to human

being and should not be conceived in terms of things. The essence of this Dasein could be

discovered in its existence. That is to say, that the beingness of Dasein can be defined in terms of

questioning since as it questions beingness in general, its being is also in question. Dasein is a

being which understands the world (the world here does not suggest an astronomical cosmos but

rather in the sense in which one speaks of a common sphere of activity of interest (For example:

when we say that one is in love). The world here is a universe that is affected by a personality, or

most typically perhaps, a sort of mental universe in which the physical, geographical and

historical environment of an individual becomes particular to him.

Heidegger tried to explain Dasein in terms of the world. He saw Dasein as a being –

already – in which one’s world is one self. Man is a maker, according to Heidegger, an idea

Heidegger shared with Bergson, who believed that the nature of man is more of productive. The

world serves as the tools for this fabrication: this picture painted by Heidegger seemed

pragmatic. This pragmatic explanation is in consonance with the pragmatism of Dewey in its

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interpretations where Dewey saw the world as an entity which undergoes steady creation.

However, the world is not the new world of pragmatism, which is able to be remade by the

simple force of commonsense but a deeply European sense of historical dependence and

entanglement.

The world as seen above in the sense of fabrication belongs to the world of ready- to-

hand (world of equipments). In the elaboration of the ready-to-hand, Heidegger attempted at

representing other beings in the world that are not human beings. His representation of them is in

their usefulness. Everything in the world that is fashioned is fashioned for a particular use. Their

usefulness demonstrates their beingness. Thus, by their nature, they are entities that are closest to

us. These entities are exhibited phenomenologically by our everyday being- in-the- world- our

day to day encounter. Such encounter has already dispersed themselves into manifold ways of

concern. This kind of dealing here is specifically a dealing of closeness which stems not from

conceptualization of such beings, but from our physically encountering them and putting them to

use

This immediately points out a very spectacular type of knowledge which deals with an

encounter beyond mere rationalism or pure empiricism. This vision of the ready- to- hand

conveys the strength of the method which Heidegger used in his work and which I explained

above in terms of disclosure. In this disclosure, the entity in question seems to be our preliminary

task and our accompanying theme but in the actual fact what our major theme is, is Being. We

look at the beingness of the entities in question which are not really the objects of knowing but

are simply what gets used what gets produced and so forth.17

Our phenomenological interpretation is not just a way of knowing those characteristics of

the entities but it is rather, knowing the very structure which the being possesses. This actually is

what fulfils Dasein as a being who tries to understand the beingness of the entities in the world.

The concept of a classroom, for instance, does not show us just the external nature of it: four

walls enclosure with board, lockers, chairs, chalk, and so on. It, however, points out to us by its

very innate disclosure the very usefulness which differentiates it from a bed room; a place for

studies and impacting of knowledge. The reaction of an individual towards it is by the very use it

is put to.

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The knowledge which Heidegger points out comes out clear. By implication, the

beingness of a being ready –to –hand is understood by its usage what Heidegger referred to as

πραγμα -pragma. It is misleading our taking the very concept of our interest in the study of

being to the things in themselves instead of on their beingness (substance and essence) which

characterize them as beings ready-to-hand. We should, however, base our inquiry into beingness

on the very nature of the being placing our interest primarily on the ontological character instead

of on the being as that which is encountered in the world. To properly represent this, Heidegger

reiterated that:

These entangling errors become plain if in the course of our investigation we now ask

which entities shall be taken as our preliminary theme and established as pre-

phenomenal basis for our study…. One may answer: Things. But it is with this obvious

answer we have perhaps already missed the pre- phenomenal basis we are seeking. For

in addressing these entities as things ‘res’ we have tacitly anticipated their ontological

character.18

From the above, it is clear that when an analysis begins with such entities and goes into

the inquiry of its beingness, what is met is the ontological state of the subject- thinghood and

reality. However to achieve the very ontological character which would be proper to designate

the thing, we have to go into defining primarily what makes an equipment what it is. In the strict

sense of it, nothing is nominally equipment. The equipment so derived is got from the function

which a thing performs ranging from serviceability, usefulness, to manipulatability (adopting

Heidegger’s direct term). So every kind of being which adapts to such an identity falls within the

concept of equipment.

This concept is different from the other things which are worldly but do not share in this

pragmatic identity. They are rather entities that give Dasein the impression of obstinacy. These

entities are not denied proper existence instead they belong to what Heidegger called un-ready-

to-hand because they are not present at hand in their characteristic but the kind of being which

equipments possess in which they manifest themselves in its own right is called the readiness- to-

hand.

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The encountering of this very being ready to hand is not just arbitrary. It follows some

basic rules which are not defied by non- circumspection. The rules followed hereof are in the

form of cannons- method. This method becomes necessary for the usage of these beings to avoid

their misappropriation or damage. A hammer, for instance, is adapted for a peculiar function.

The rules governing this equipment are such as to avoid a bad usage or abuse. These rules apply

both to the object and more especially Dasein who attempts to put them to use.

Evidently the real nature of the world is determined by Dasein whose nature it is to raise

the question of being. This raising of the question of Being ensures a gradual openness of the

world thus the steady creation emphasized above. Dasein- a being at the center of beingness is

not outside of being itself and thus cannot stand in relation to it as other objects of thought. This

being the case, the examination of the nature of the Dasein’s existence will be relevant here

together with other mode of existents. We, therefore, proceed to unravel the structure of human

existence (which we could understand as Dasein by the use which Heidegger put it in the Being

and Time).

The structure of the mode of human existence is in the being-in-the-world. It is in this

being in the world that Dasein fully relates with the non-self, which represents the world of

things and other persons in which the self always finds itself in along- side. This manner of

existence represents the facticity of Dasein. Dasein’s facticity x-rays the nature of the human

being as a being- already- in. This particular nature of Dasein shows its limitedness to the extent

that the world is beyond the willingness of Dasein. It suffices to say that Dasein has been cast

into the world, a world which does not represent the sense of the immense indefinitely extended

cosmos but a world which is not separable from the nature of Dasein itself.

This world cannot be explained without Dasein than Dasein without it. Dasein is cast

into the world (what Heidegger describes as thrownness) not of its own making but within the

inescapable limitedness of Dasein’s contingency. This situation inspires in Dasein a strong

desire to understand (verstans) his world, to get familiar with it and put it under control. This

strong desire impresses in Dasein the desire to become to itself a creating being which lies

ontico- ontologically in him.This desire in Dasein leads it to forfeiture an attempt by Dasein to

transcend himself.

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But primarily, we must understand the real nature of Dasein which is pegged on social

nature. Dasein is being-in-common. This goes to inform us of the existential and social

interdependence of Das-seinde in the day-to-day experience. This experience is constitutive and

primordial. Thus, Dasein necessarily interacts with itself and the world; this interaction is self-

affirming orchestrating the self-consciousness of Dasein and the consciousness of other beings

(which Dasein possesses as well). This self-consciousness (we must be careful) is not Cartesian.

We do not necessarily begin with ourselves as indubitable; hence deduce from ourselves to

others we are instead constituted ontologically by our preoccupations in which the tools as

objects are made use of.

This pre-occupation, is what drives man into the attempt of self transcendence. Generally,

some of our responsibilities are easy to be shifted aside while others cannot. It is these

responsibilities that we cannot push aside that form the very strongest desire of man to achieving

authenticity. When Dasein withdraws the effort to attain authenticity, the ‘I’ which is the very

essences of Dasein is hidden away in the one (the logical one which represents the unity of

beings). Dasein is not just a thing in the world of things. It is a being of mineness, a being of

freedom and ability to choose.

Mineness is a pre-ontological characteristic of Dasein in which Dasein is given to

knowing itself as itself, being an individual (as Kierkegaard used the word). This is an ability of

Dasein to live its life as separated from the crowd captured in the existentiell (aware of authentic

and inauthentic existence). This mineness, so to speak, makes Dasein’s choice and freedom more

meaningful, as in mineness one is faced with freedom to make the choice between an authentic

and inauthentic life style. This choice is a choice of transcendence or being hidden away in the

anonymous we, a representation of the social structure of man. This is an impersonal mode of

being which Dasein cannot get rid of.

The other mode of Dasein’s existence- fallenness does not express any negative

evaluation, but is used to signify that Dasein is proximally and for the most part along side the

world of its concerns. Dasein’s being- in- the- world was not chosen by it but demands to be

taken charge by it while the world discloses its-self to Dasein. Dasein by this fact responds to the

world by his interpretation based on his finitude (Befindlickeit) which shows, further the capacity

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of Dasein to respond to the world. The nature of Dasein, from the Heideggerian perspective, may

not really be overcome since the achievements of Dasein as being-in-the world can never be

finalized. Dasein spends all times without end striving towards a goal, hence there is a

continuous interest and endless attempt to interpret and comprehend the world. This sums up the

existential analysis of Dasein.

At this juncture, the forfeiture of Dasein comes out more clearly. The possible nature of

Dasein accounts for its futuristic existence, which it lives up to by constantly projecting itself.

Thus Dasein seeks to vacillate between its being thrown into the world and its effort to

comprehend the world. The answer to the being of Dasein lies in the possibilities of Dasein.

Suffice it to say, that the meaning of the human existence is elaborated in the possible nature of

the human actions but man gives meanings to the other ready-to-hand beings, related to him by

its usage of them.

Dasein exists as an anticipation of its own possibilities. It exists ahead of itself and is by

this fact challenged to achieve the personality which he may become (potentiality of

authenticity) not what he must become (inauthenticity of the Dasein). Dasein has its main

component as reaching out. Dasein reaches out beyond itself; its very being which consists in

aiming at a time or personality which is not yet. This projection we must understand, according

to Heidegger, does not exceed the boundaries of the world it has been given. Peter Streeter in

line with this explained that the existentiality of Dasein is the understanding of human being by

itself and there with the nature of its world; it is Dasein’s understanding of the world 19

.

The self and the world are not separable. This justifies the former explanation I gave

about the world as a unity of objects which Heidegger referred to as ready to hand (equipments)

and other beings that are un-ready-to-hand. The tools as ready-to-hand can never be alone. A tool

necessarily refers to other tools which form a system from which each of them receives its being.

We cannot therefore fully identify a tool from the complex of which it is part. Thus, Charles

Winchell de Clety emphasized that the complex nature of these tools refers to broader systems

and, finally, to a global structure which is not just the sum total of tools but an organic totality

presupposed by the existence of each particular object 20

.

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Dasein, in its self-projection and transcendence, understands the world and thus

understands itself. However, the world, despite its being a creative energy to Dasein, Dasein,

which sees to the understanding of the world, also posses itself as the agent by which it is

seduced from its essential thrown to understand the world and to create (which is primary to

Dasein according to Heidegger). This seduction is, what Heidegger explained must be forfeited.

For him, Dasein must leave off the drawing force of the ‘we’. Dasein must sacrifice inevitably

and continuously the driving force of ‘they’ which stifles the possibility of the authenticity of the

‘I’. It is in the nature of man to be public; being everyday among others which alienates it from

its central task- becoming itself as a being-towards-an-end. Thus, an existence which is entirely

ruled by the anonymous crowd is an inauthentic human existence.

Dasein stands out from things by not being completely absorbed in them. Dasein,

thrown into the world, continues its dwelling in it until death; it falls away from being

submerged into things and so remains a project. However, there are times when Dasein may be

submerged into things to the extent that it is, at least, temporarily absorbed (Anfgehen). At this

point, Dasein is not known as in individual entity per se. This submergence is characterized by

idle talk (Grede) and curiosity. In idle talk, the talker and the listener do not stand in any genuine

personal relation or in any intimate relation to what is being talked about. Curiosity is, however,

a form of distraction. It portrays a need for the ‘new’ (quid novum). Curiosity, further, depicts a

need for something different. This, however, excludes capability or even a real interest in art of

wondering.

In the understanding of Idle talk, Heidegger took a stance that seems to run counter to the

common sense understanding of it as something negative. Heidegger however pointed out that

the concept of idle talk does not deny Dasein of its actual beingness but becomes a method of

expressing beingness though in the secondary manner. In fact, he defined idle talk as the

possibility of understanding everything without previously making the thing ones own21

. His

position as to the positivity of the idle talk is thus expressed:

The expression of idle talk (Grede) is not to be used here in a

disparaging signification. Terminologically, it signifies a positive

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phenomenon which constitutes the kind of being of everyday

Dasein understands and interpreting22

.

Heidegger in this section tried to bring out the nature of Dasein as a being with. This

aspect of Dasein’s beingness is expressed in language. The phrase idle talk was to be for

Heidegger a way through which beingness is expressed mediately through language-

communication. Dasein, as a being with, projects a revelation of beingness in communication to

the listener who is not directly opportune to encounter the topic of discourse himself. This is a

part of beingness of Dasein which presents it as both a being with and a being in the world. By

the encounter of the very object of communication, Dasein communicator has a first hand

encounter with the being (object of discourse), which it communicates to the other Dasein along

side as a gossip or passing the word along.

This communication is not only verbal it can also be carried out through the process of

writing. The reader, in a written discourse, encounters being in a secondary manner. The writer

brings forth in his writing a fruit of shallow reading which he passes through the written process.

This idea so projected by the writer like in verbal discourse spreads out to the public who are

then opportune to encounter the topic of discourse (as an encountered being) in the same

secondary or mediated manner.

Heidegger was not ignorant of the possibility of falsehood in the idle talk. He explained

that the idle talk; a form of communication is not aimed at speaking the untruth or deceiving the

listeners who do not have the opportunity of encountering the object of discourse; he said:

…One need not aim deceive. Idle talk does not have the kind of being which belongs to

consciously passing off something as something else. The fact that something has been

said groundlessly and gets passed along in further retelling amounts to perverting the act

of disclosing into an act of closing off. For what is said is understood proximally as

disclosing something.23

Heidegger’s idea shows that idle talk constitutes the essential nature of Dasein which

despite the uprooting caused by the idle talk is not removed from beingness by it instead posses

the idle talk as Dasein’s most everyday and most stubborn reality. This idle talk forms a part of

the life world of Dasein in which communication is made possible in the first place. The

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beingness and the functionality of the idle talk is closely tied to the curiosity which, according to

Heidegger, forms one of the essential properties of Dasein.

Explaining curiosity, Heidegger did not take up a strange connotation from the concept of

idle talk. He emphasized the importance of this curiosity to Dasein in terms of the being

disclosure. Heidegger began his explanation of curiosity from the concept lumen naturale which

makes disclosure possible in the first place. This term lumen naturale- natural light, is that

through which the eyes (the organ for sight) keeps the whole body lighted up. Sight, is possible

because of the ‘clearing’ which is a designated disclosedness of being-in. Thus thinking about

illumination, we are driven to a particular characteristic of Dasein- ‘understanding’. The essence

of sight in understanding of curiosity was expressed by Heidegger in these statements:

The basic state of sight itself is a peculiar-tendency-of-Being which Belongs to

everydayness- the tendency towards’… We designate tendency by term

“curiosity” (Neuger), which characteristically is not confined to seeing, but

expresses the tendency towards a peculiar way of letting the world be

encountered by us in perception24

.

Curiosity explains a manner in which the world discloses itself to us. We do not restrict

ourselves to an orientation towards cognition, which according to the Greeks, is conceived as the

desire to see. By this fact, the desire to see, encounter, observe, notice, etc. is essential to the

being of Dasein. Curiosity in brief is seen here as a cognitive experience.

Curiosity as Heidegger conceived it is the inner propensity of Dasein to pierce towards

the future. This piercing into the future evidently is in search of the things that are new only to

grasp them and look for newer realities. In this Dasein seeks what is far only to bring it closer to

itself in the way it looks. In curiousity, Dasein is carried away by the looks of the world wherein

it concerns itself with becoming rid of itself as both a being in the world and being alongside-

abandonment. Thus in the freedom of Dasein’s curiousity, it no longer looks to understand but

looks for the sake of looking. The result is that Dasein does not seek the leisure of keeping watch

observantly but rather seeks restlessness and excitement of the new discoveries and the changes

it encounters.

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The above discoursed qualities of Dasein point towards the very ultimate ontic and

ontological explanation which Heidegger gave to Dasein and which formed the major part of his

deconstruction- the concept of being within time. The meaningfulness of Dasein and indeed

other beings depended on this concept of being in relation to time. We shall thus expose how

Heidegger conceived being in terms of time.

3.5 Dasein and Temporality.

The major stricture which Heidegger had against the previous ontologies was the way in

which ‘being’ was used. Heidegger saw a low leveled ontology in the Greek ontology. Based on

this discovery, He set off to destroy such ontology and build a fresh one. In his work, he did not

see any reason why being should be discoursed different from time which makes it meaningful in

the first place. Heidegger, at this level, identified the Kantian philosophy as coming very close to

the concept of discourse of being which he tried to project. However, his disappointment in

Kantian philosophy came up in the neglect by Kant of being in relation to time and his

subsequent adaptation of Descartes’ backward philosophy. Heidegger pointed out this

disappointment in Kant, thus:

The first and only person who has gone any stretch of the way towards investigating the

dimension of Temporality or has even let himself be drawn hither by the coercion of the

phenomena themselves is Immanuel Kant. . . . But two things stood on his way: In the

first place, he altogether neglected the problem of being; and in connection with this he

failed to provide ontology with the Dasein as a theme… Instead of this Kant took over

from Descartes quite dogmatically not withstanding the essential respects in which he had

gone beyond him.25

Temporality, for Heidegger, is the real basis through which the question of being is raised

in the first place. Dasein, whose task it is to raise the question of being has its meaningfulness

and authenticity fully made explainable by the import of the historicality give rise to by

temporality.

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Temporality is the primordial meaning of Dasein’s being. The temporal character of

Dasein is derived from its ontological structure made up of Dasein’s existence, thrownness and

fallenness. These three phenomena are so interrelated that they form this single unified

phenomenon called care, the pre-ontological concept of Dasein. The care comes up here by the

very attempt of Dasein to live, through these moments of its historicality, a life of authenticity by

the choice already offered by mineness. Evidently, the quest for authenticity is so tied to the

being of Dasein that it takes hold of it. It is in this authenticity that temporality reveals itself

most.

Temporality naturally delineates the distinction between an authentic and in-authentic

experience of time. In the inauthentic experience of time, time presents itself to Dasein as a

series of ‘nows’ such that they are leveled off, each devoid of its intrinsic relations with the

others. The above, as Heidegger puts it, renders them a period of uniform succession26

. Amidst

the distractions that laden this inauthentic experience of time, one identifies a big difficulty

clarifying the true nature of the present or even of time in general. On the other hand, in the

authentic experience of time, time is explained in terms of the future which is revealed only in

resoluteness27

.

We can infer that Martin Heidegger understands the time-now in terms of transient as a

beginning of a journey of self transcendence into the future. We experience temporality in a

phenomenally primordial way in Dasein’s steady anticipation of its actualization which is the

very goal of temporality. This anticipatory resoluteness pulls the present out of the objects of

immediate concern and binds it firmly with the future and the past to give an authentic present-

the moment of vision. We must be careful here not to objectify the Heidegger’s conception

temporality. Temporality in relation to space is a phenomenon which brings itself out more in the

course of Dasein’s existence as Dasein performs its activities. Thus, temporality, so to speak, is a

movement through the world as a space of possibilities.

Heidegger further explained, through temporality, a historicality of Dasein which he said

gives Dasein’s existence a historical character. Primarily, the understanding of Dasein about

itself and its environment necessitates its authenticity. It becomes clearer that Dasein is defined

according to its relationship to its nature and relationship with other things. However, history

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does not entail a connectedness of motions in the alteration of objects or a free floating sequence

of experiences as David Hume would suggest. For Heidegger, history makes man’s existence

more meaningful as it is tied to the understanding of Dasein through tradition which is also given

by a preceding history of Dasein. Dasein is primarily a being who has history attached to its

nature. By this it is deducible that Dasein is a being that exists through history. The world history

then becomes the succession of the events of the human history.

The factical existence of Dasein makes it possible for it to encounter the things that are

disconcerted in the world. These things are ready-at-hand and present-at-hand in every case, and

are co-operated into this history of the world. Thus, the historical world is factical in Dasein’s

understanding of the world of entities within the world. The central entity in evaluating this

history is Dasein. The authentic Dasein responds to historicality in its resoluteness. This

response brings it close to actualization which is experienced in death.

Dasein’s actualization, nevertheless, is a repetition of possibilities, which are handed

down to oneself in anticipation. This is self-resoluteness against the inconstancy of distraction

which is, in it-self, a steadiness which has been stretched along and which Dasein’s fate

incorporated it into. This is such that even as Dasein is faced with this death, the possibilities of

the authentic existence leads it yet into a constancy that is culminated in its loyal existence to its

own self as a being which is ready for anxiety. In sum, the factual authenticity of Dasein through

temporality is nothing but the situation in which Dasein, as a being of possibility, projects itself

towards the future aiming at authentic existence which even the anxiety towards death to which

it is destined cannot destroy. It portrays an existential possibility in which fate and world- history

determines the history of Dasein.

Heidegger, however, carefully outlined how this future in which history discloses itself

with the past and present unite in the art of understanding. In his discuss on temporality and

everydayness, Heidegger attempted to make an interpretation of Dasein’s everyday life, to see

how the daily existential mode of Dasein rooted in the unity of the past – thrownness, present-

fallenness and future- existence explain Dasein’s existence. But primarily, we must understand

from Heidegger’s work that the very temporal character of everydayness is dependent upon a

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prior temporal analysis of Disclosedness, Dasein as Being-in-the world and the problem of

transcendence.

The very concept of disclosedness is constituted by four structures; they are:

understanding (verstand), state of mind, falling and discourse28

. The temporality of disclosedness

therefore consists in the interpretation of these structures which constitute disclosedness. These

structures are interwoven in themselves, that is to say, that they are united in their structure. This

is clear as each individual understands beings from the mind. Furthermore, the understanding,

which one has in a certain state of mind, is capable of falling but can only articulate itself with

regards to its intelligibility in discourse.

In the temporality of understanding, Heidegger saw understanding as a unity of the past,

the present and future. Sequel to this, he highlighted two types of understanding; the authentic

and the inauthentic understanding. He explained the authentic understanding as a projection

towards a potentiality for being the sake of which the Dasein exists- the very purpose of the

beingness of Dasein. It is based on this that Dasein, in existing, can develop the awareness of its

ontological nature; that it is a being-unto-death. This entails that understanding is being fully

aware of one’s ability to be, which must include the possibility, not the actuality of coming into

being.

Dasein is latent with possibilities; but these possibilities are realized when Dasein is

resolute. After this realization, Dasein starts projecting itself into these possibilities which

explain the future. This means that the authentic understanding entails becoming aware of or

going back to the past and its projection taking place in the present at the moment of fallenness29

.

When the latent possibilities identified by Martin Heidegger, as being possessed by Dasein are

forgotten by it, Dasein stands to have an inauthentic understanding. The inauthentic

understanding is also a unity of the past, present and future. At this juncture reference is made to

the inauthenticity of time.

Evidently Heidegger may have forgotten to discourse the nature of the mind directly in

his analysis of authenticity but his work clearly states the place of the mind in the explanation of

authenticity which consists of Dasein’s existence as a being unto death. The place of the mind in

the discourse of authenticity comes in as the expression of mood. Understanding presupposes a

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state of mind in which potentiality will be disclosed. This state of mind refers to mood. Mood

determines the very nature of the understanding which one has it can be authentic or inauthentic.

As authentic, the mood functions to disclose the potentiality of being of Dasein. This authentic

mood is identified as anxiety-Angst.

Anxiety is a basic state of mind. Nature is authenticated by the fact that it brings Dasein

face to face with what ‘is’- its real nature as a being towards death. The mood of anxiety (angst)

forces Dasein to individualize itself (authenticate) amidst the disturbance of the community,

which tends to draw it into the popular ‘they’. It does this by making the world in which Dasein

exists to sink into insignificance30

. The ‘angst’ reveals to Dasein the insignificance of the world,

which reveals ‘nothingness’ (das nicht). It is when Dasein is faced with the insignificance and

nothingness of the world that anxiety brings to its thrown potentiality for the being (towards-

death) which Dasein begins to project himself. With the above, Dasein is brought back to its own

most thrown nature which represents the moment of the past and having become aware of this, it

will project itself upon it as a possibility which represents the moment of future; a decision

which takes place in the present.

This anxiety gives a feeling of uncertainty and indeterminacy. In anxiety, one is not very

sure of what he is about to undergo thus there is a kind of anticipation not expectation (I will

address the issue of expectation and anticipation later). Anxiety is different from fear. Both of

them come with a kind of shrinking away. However, while anxiety deals with lack of full

awareness, fear is definite on the object of fear. For instance, one can be anxious about an

examination but is afraid of masquerades. The anxiety about the exams shows a kind of dread

from uncertainty of what the examination gives. But in the issue of the masquerades, the

individual knows the dangerous operation of this masquerade. Kierkegaard saw anxiety as that

which comes up with mixed feelings of happiness and sadness, happiness because one looks

forward to it and sadness because one does not know what the experience would look like.

Fear, against anxiety, is a bewilderment, or depression. It is an inauthentic state of mind

in the sense that it shots Dasein off from its thrownness or potentialities-for-being. As thrown,

Dasein has an implicit potentiality-for-being, then as fallen (a being onto the present) he is

absorbed into a community. This absorption creates fear in Dasein a fear of how to preserve

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itself in the midst of this. As the sight of the community overwhelms Dasein it forgets its nature

and resorts to projecting itself upon those possibilities of self-preservation and evasion which it

has discovered before hand in the environment. This inauthenticity, however, is routed in

temporarily because it is the unity of having forgotten one’s own most nature and inauthentic

projection of oneself towards things in the world (awaiting future) and the inauthentic present in

which both take place.

It is in this being-in-the world’s disclosure that we find the basic state of Dasein- care.

Care is that which Dasein reveals itself as. Explaining care, Heidegger went a ground to pick a

short allegory to drive home his conception. Here, he gave what he called the primordial

explanation of nature of Dasein. Before this, he already agreed that the preliminary existential-

ontological analysis of Dasein was that Dasein’s being is care. At that rate, still, he equally

raised the question as to whether this basic existential-ontological structure of Dasein must itself

be explicated in terms of a more primordial phenomenon.

This explanation of Dasein in terms of care by Heidegger was not forced under an idea of

his own contriving31

. At this juncture, we must appreciate the fact that Heidegger’s

understanding of Dasein as that which has a pre-ontological understanding of itself is purely

unaffected by any theoretical interpretation. One gets the reality of beingness in disclosure

which, in the final analysis, makes a ‘confirmation’ of Dasein as care. By the very introduction

of confirmation, Heidegger re-echoes the concept of disclosure or uncovering. To say the least,

confirmation is the phenomenal context within which Heidegger tries to demonstrate that which

is the case. Confirmation connotes the being showing forth or disclosing itself in its self-

sameness (as the being is in itself) 32

.

The fable which Heidegger used in postulating Dasein’s being presents an ontic-

existential confirmation of Dasein’s being as care to the extent that, here, Dasein truly expresses

itself both primordially and pre-ontologically. Thus, we can ‘confirm’ the truth of Dasein’s

being. Nevertheless Heidegger still insisted that existential interpretation is not mere fabrication;

having done this, he presented evidence and a witness in which Dasein’s witness is reported.

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This fable on care presented by Heidegger was said to be fabricated by Hyginus. In this

fable, which authenticates Dasein as care and as that which exists within timeness, care was

crossing a river and picked up some clay which it gave some shape. Later, Jupiter appeared and

bestowed upon cares’ creation, life and spirit. But a very lengthy dispute eschewed among the

earth, Jupiter and care as to who gives its own name to this new creature. At last, Saturn

appeared in the scene as a mediator among the three. In his judgment, he decided that since

Jupiter gave this creature spirit, at the creature’s death he would receive its spirit. However, the

earth who contributed the body would take the body back at the end and nothing more, but since

it was care who shaped this creature first, she would possess it so long as it lives. Since it was

made from the earth it was going to be called ‘homo’ stemming from humus-soil.

This fable, which Heidegger presented, plays up some points. In the first place, so long as

Dasein remains in the world it stands possessed by care. The name which is given to Dasein, as

homo, depicts its facticity. This shows that Dasein’s existence is factical. The seemingly most

important relevance of this fable is the function of the Saturn which stands in as timeness while

mediating among the three complainants. Time becomes the determinant factor in the decision as

to the beingness and naming of Dasein. Time still prefigured the grounds of the structure of the

care. In this sense we will anticipate the function of temporality, in Heidegger’s explanation, as

that which makes historicality possible and that, which severs as a determinate condition for

history. We will not doubt, from the above conclusion, that temporality is the ultimate grounds

for the very major characteristics which constitute Dasein namely the care and historicality.

The above existential concept of Dasein, which stems from its pre-ontological

explanation as care, we must understand, does not go into treatment of anthropology which

merely studies man as a being in his community. This aspect of Heidegger’s work goes beyond

anthropology while focusing on the question of fundamental ontology which is at the base of his

ontological deconstruction. Heidegger puts it thus:

By our own ontological interpretations of Dasein, we have been brought to the

existential conception of care from Dasein’ pre ontological interpretation of

itself as care. . .yet the analytic of Dasein is not aimed at laying an ontological

basis for anthropology, its purpose is one of fundamental ontology. This is the

purpose that has tacitly determined the course of our consideration . . . . 33

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Based on the above, we will recall the very starting point of Heidegger, which is to

answer the question of being. His understanding of the world and Dasein which, for him, is a

being that does the proving and makes request for proofs, shows that the whole discourse of

beingness centres on meaningfulness, which is impacted on by Dasein’s possibility of

authenticity (Dasein’s resoluteness).

The role of care and anxiety is made relevant by the presence of death. The care has the

function of bringing some calmness in the anxiety of Dasein towards death. In the presence of

death, Dasein is faced with the restlessness which seems to drag it down in dread. This anxiety in

the ‘anticipation’ of death affects the being of Dasein towards authenticity.

The concept of anticipation is differentiated from the idea of expectation. Despite the fact

that the two are closely tied to a looking forward to a future, they are differentiated in their

intricacies. In anticipation, Dasein looks forward to an unknown reality which must surely come.

However, the nature of the anticipated event is not very known to Dasein. Against anticipation,

expectation has definitiveness. On looks forward to getting to/at what is expected. For instance, a

man who sends out a letter expects a particular reaction from the person to whom the letter is

sent. This is expectation. It goes with a manner of surety.

In sum, the meaningfulness of Dasein’s existence is linked to the understanding of

Dasein as a being unto an end. This end lies in death; a period of being-no-longer- there. The

gallant understanding and acceptance of this makes Dasein authentic. Dasein’s existential

structure therefore lies in its temporality. This concept of temporality as mentioned cuts into a

concept quite different from duration which is a concept so tightly held by philosophers before

him especially Hegel.

Hegel’s commitment to dialectics of time and the triumphant end of history are taken to

be a largely deterministic and historical philosophy. The world history, for him, exhibits nothing

other than plan of providence. He develops his belief in his expression that the world is made of

history which is purposeful through time of the spirit. Hegel was caught between the gap in

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history which engages events as the product of time and space and philosophy which seem to

deal with universal rules and meanings.

His concerns were centered on finding the truth about the nature of realty. Because he

seeks metaphysical first principle of nature, his result may not be rightly judged through

objective facts but only through individual reflection. Heidegger tried to explain what his

(Hegel’s) exact understanding of time is. To achieve this, he made a comparison of the

existential-ontological connection of temporality, Dasein and the world time.

With the Hegel’s way of taking the relation between time and spirit, Hegel theorizes that

history which is the stage by state development of the absolute spirit runs its course in time. Thus

historical development falls into time. Hegel did not end with just postulating that spirit still falls

in within timeness; he rather sought to understand how a non-sensous being can really fall into

time. Time must be able to accommodate the spirit and the spirit in turn must be akin to time.

Bringing in the issue of Dasein’s existential analysis, Heidegger explained that this

analysis starts with the concretion of tactically thrown existence itself as to unveil temporality as

that which makes this existence possible primarily. He explained that spirit does not fall into

time but is in existence not as anything but as a primordial temporalizing of timeness. Thus he

stated conclusively:

Temporality temporalizes world-time, within the horizon of which history can

appear as historizing within-time. Spirit does not fall into time but factical

existence falling from primordial, authentic temorality34

.

In brief, the very ontological and existential analysis of Dasein is rooted in temporality.

Thus, when being manifests itself, its projection is made possible by temporality and the way

temporality is directed. Thus Dasein is a being within timeness and a being which is

authenticated by temporality thus actualized in death or nothingness.

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END NOTES

1) Martin Heidegger, Die Lehre vom Urteil Psychologismus in Heidegger’ Being and Time

The Analytic of Dasein as Fundamental Ontology ed. Joseph Kockelmans (USA: American

University Press1989), 1.

2) Martin Heidegger, Being and Time transl. by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New

York: Harper and Row Publ. Ltd. 1962), 2.

3) Martin Heidegger, 426

4) Martin Heidegger, 43

5) Martin Heidegger, 59

6) Martin Heidegger, 58-59

7) Martin Heidegger, 101

8) Martin Heidegger, 102

9) Martin Heidegger, 58

10) Martin Heidegger, 59

11) Martin Heidegger, On Time and Being transl. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper and Row

1972), 20

12) Max Scheler, Man’s Place in Nature transl. Hans Meyerhoff, (Boston: Beacon Press 1961),

52.

13) Jean Paul Sartre, The Transcendence of the Ego transl William Kirkipatrick and Forest

Williams (New York: Noonday Press 1957), 91

14) Francis See Burger, Heidegger and Phenomenological reduction (London: Peguine Books

1978), 219.

15) Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, 66

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16) Francis See Burger, Heidegger and Phenomenological reduction, 220

17) Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, 42

18) Martin Heidegger, 96

19) H.J. Blackham, Six Existentialist Philosophers (New York: Harper and Row Pub. 1959), 88

20) Charles Winchell de Clety,65.

21) Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, 212

22) Martin Heidegger, 212

23) Martin Heidegger, 213

24) Martin Heidegger, 214.

25) Martin Heidegger, 45

26) Martin Heidegger, 315

27) Martin Heidegger, 314

28) T. Sheehaut, Heidegger Martin in Routledge encyclopedia of Philosophy Vol. 4 by Crieg

(New York: Routledge 1998), 405.

29) T. Sheehaut, Heidegger Martin, 406

30) Chris Blaisedell, Heidegger’s Structure of Time and Temporality in Dialogue (USA: Mc

Grawhill1975.), 28

31) John Caputo, Time and Being in Heidegger in Modern Schoolmen 1973, 76.

32) John Caputo, 47

33) Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, 227.

34) Martin Heidegger, 486

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CHAPTER FOUR

Evaluation of Martin Heidegger’s Ontological Deconstruction.

The task which Martin Heidegger set out to perform in his work Being and Time- to raise and

answer the question of being- ushered into metaphysics an existential touch which seems to set a new

stage for a more practical approach to metaphysical problems. He made a total overhaul of the foundation

of metaphysics which held sway during his time while replacing it with a more practical methodology

which stands the taste of time-the phenomenological method. Having arrived at an existential method

with which he tried to accomplish his task, he set off to deal with the problem of ontology which he

believed had long been forgotten by his predecessors.

This chapter will therefore investigate Heidegger’s work, Being and Time, where he attempts at

deconstructing ontology, a study which he believed would lead us to a better understanding of ourselves

in particular and our would at large.

`

4.1 Heidegger and the Deconstruction.

The concept deconstruction appeared to have summarized the Heidegger’s thesis in the Being and

Time. The beginning of the Being and Time was a complaint by Heidegger about the damages of the

previous ontologies to philosophy. The above complaint of Heidegger led him to another systematic

revolution which was formerly carried out by Rene Descartes in the modern period. Descartes before

Heidegger tried to pull down the edifice of knowledge which he had gathered in the past which was shaky

as a result of a faulty foundation. He sought to rebuild another foundation how successful he was in such

is the question yet to be answered.

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Heidegger began his own revolution which he called a destruktion of metaphysics. This

destruction was geared towards re-instating the fundamental question which the previous ontologies

neglected and therefore fell into a forgetfulness of being. This fundamental question consists in

identifying being with the world in timeness as its essence and further breaking, through systematic

analysis, the hierarchy in the analysis of beings in the world. Following the above, Heidegger projected

Dasein as a being which answers the question of beings and understands beings as they disclose

themselves to it (Dasein). The basis of this phenomenology lies on this deconstruction.

Thinking of the concept of deconstruction by Heidegger brings us to an epistemological point of

departure. The phenomenological method which Heidegger employed made it necessary to inquire into

what is knowable and what is not knowable. By the phenomenological method, Heidegger supposes that

the objects of knowledge (ready- at-hand or present- at- hand) show themselves to the perceiving mind-

Dasein who knows them as they are disclosed to it. Here there is a perception of beings as objectively

existent being though with a prejudice as its nature and place in the world.

The above represented idea by Heidegger has a footing in the Husserl’s phenomenology where

there is an objective beingness of things but different from it to the extent that there is a

presuppositionless grasp of beingness in Husserl’s phenomenology. There is, no doubt, a serious link

between these two authors’ ideas on phenomenology and deconstruction. Many scholars like Brian Elliot

would surmise that the Heidegger’s idea of deconstruction is ‘fully taken from that of Edmund Husserl’1.

The link in the idea of deconstruction between these two phenomenologists is explainable

through the Kantian theory of imagination. The Kantian theory of imagination came up in his attempt to

explain the minds ability of grasping things through the imposition of the categories on the objectively

real things. This capability was brought out clear in his postulation of the ‘Transcendental Deduction’.

This transcendental deduction is not like a logical deduction but a proof of the activities of the categories

in the eliciting knowledge from the empirical things. In other words, the task of transcendental deduction

is to portray the fact that categories are conditions which are necessary for the grasp of the objects of

thought. Suffice it to say that Kant was of the opinion that objects of thought are unthinkable without the

categories.

The operation of the categories in relation to the objects of thought was brought out by his use of

verbindung and conjunctio. These two words suggest a synthesis which is necessarily required for the

knowledge of an object to take place. At this juncture, I must not fail to point out the difficulty there in

the elaboration of the Kantian ‘transcendental deduction’. Kant, in the first place, describes the object of

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knowledge as that in the concept of which the manifold of a given intuition is united2. Thus there is a

unity hereof which suggests already that the connection of a manifold can never be given to us by the

sense since it is an act of the spontaneity of the power of presentation. Therefore, for knowledge to take

place there is bound to be a synthesis of the categorial functions be it conscious or unconscious, intuitive

or sensible. This is summed up as a unity of the perceiving and thinking subject (the res cogitans and the

res sensum). Objects are thought of in the first place by the means of the categories but are made

thinkable by the unity off the perceiver and thinker. Without this unity, nothing which has the capability

of being thought (belonging to the function of the res sensum which has grasped by the means of

categories) would be thinkable (since the res cogitans has not played in).

In this unity, there is a relation between the subject and the manifold intuition is called pure

apperception by Kant. This pure apperception is distinct from the empirical apperception (the sensible

awareness of objects). At the empirical perceptive level there is no strict unity. But the possibility of an

identical ‘cogito’ which must follow all empirical representations serves a steady condition for every

experience. This implicitly shows forth the existence of the transcendental unity of the self-consciousness

which is not given as phenomenal object of perception. This does not however entail a prior knowledge of

the ‘I’ as the ego over and above the ‘cogito’ they are so bound up that there is no temporal distinction.

Therefore there is no knowledge of objects unless there is a unity between the subject and the manifold

intuition3.

This fully designates the function of the categories in the eliciting of knowledge. However, the

problem Kant encountered was how the diverse categories could function to elicit knowledge of just one

single object or to better put what determines which categories are applied in the knowledge of which

object. This was sorted out by the postulation of the imagination (Einbildungskraft). The imagination

serves as the mediating power or the faculty between understanding and sensibility. The imagination

bears the schemata, which is a rule for image production of images.

The issue of imagination provides the focus by which one could trace this sense from its inception

in Husserl to its eventual 'destruction' (Abbau) in Heidegger. The analysis of this unearthens what Elliott

calls its 'pre-sense', the structures and articulations of human existence which it is supposed to show.

Heidegger's 'turn' is also a turn away from imagination as a central feature of human existence. This

makes the point of departure from phenomenology in the Husserlian sense remarkable. The study of the

concept of deconstruction which is based on the idea of phenomenology places a sort of contextual

diversity in the idea entirely thus if the studies in phenomenology goes beyond Husserl and Heidegger,

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this will be with a transformed notion of 'heterotopic' imagination, which captures the historical and

communal sense of experience.

The studies in deconstruction show that Husserl broke away from Kant's philosophy. Husserl

introduced the 'categorial intuition'. By this Husserl means to undo the demarcation between the sensible

and the rational. But with this gap gone, the notion of a transcendental imagination, which in Kant's

system is required to bridge it, seems to have lost meaningfulness. Dismissing the hypostasis of acts into

faculties and rejecting the view that rational order is more of superimposition than a focus on sensible

experience, Husserl transforms his 'critique' into a description of how 'logical' structure is adumbrated at

the most basic level of conscious life. The understanding/sensibility-divide is thereby converted into an

"intention/fulfilment dynamic", in which "any act of intuition is the fulfilment of an intention that

necessarily precedes it as an 'empty intending' of the object meant." 4

Husserl unlike Kant makes clear only the essential methodological role which the imagination

plays for phenomenology. Husserl's interest in imagination, we must immediately understand, was

motivated by his interest in mathematical and conceptual objects, which demand an explanation of how

we can intend something that has no empirical reality. This leads Husserl to an account that implies an

'indifference' of meaningful acts of presentation to the concrete existence or reality of what such acts

mean or aim at: the 'sense of being' for consciousness is not essentially that of empirical reality.5

Heidegger based on the above tenets of imagination made a hermeneutical critique of Husserl,

from his appropriation of Kant's notion of productive imagination around the concept of temporality,

towards a strong notion of freedom and transcendence. The supposed understanding between Husserl and

Kantian theory collapsed under the Heidegger's thesis which brings to a halt Husserl’s earlier attempts to

place imagination at the centre of phenomenology. Instead, Heidegger separates historical truth from

human freedom. To be sure, Heidegger implicitly substitutes the transcendental-aesthetic with a mythical-

poetic figure of imagination. Elliott's analyzes this better saying that

This move is understood here as marking an abandonment of phenomenology in

any meaningful sense, that is, it constitutes the 'ab-sence' of phenomenology within

Heidegger's thought.6

This 'ab-sence' stipulated by Elliott creates from Heidegger a new phenomenology that seeks

dialogue not with science but with art. Hence one sees the effort of Heidegger to break away from the old

tradition to a new one by designing for himself a foundation which consists in overcoming metaphysics

and thus recover a kind of thinking that is responsive to being. This entails a destructuring (Destruktion)

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of the philosophical tradition. It represents an interpretative methodology that exposes a fundamental

experience of ‘being’ which stands as a foundation for previous philosophies that had become subsumed

and hidden within the theoretical structure of the metaphysics of presence. This Destruktion is not simply

a negative operation but instead a positive change or recovery.

The nature of this destruction is traceable from the phenomenological hermeneutics of Heidegger.

Heidegger in his methodology understood the nature of philosophy and what it actually stands for.

Philosophy by its structure and function goes into the investigation and interpretation of the being of life

(centering on facticity). In this, there is a radical questioning of the nature of the universe. This apparent

skepticism builds philosophy into a base of atheism. However, since it goes into questioning the very

“how” of life’s own indigenous exposition and interpretation of life on the basis of the ways in which life

temporalizes itself speaks of itself, it is a fundamental ontology. It is thus from this ontology that other

ontologies take off.

This fundamental ontology has a task of moving into the subject matter of the factical life

consisting of history. This history in question is not just an arbitrary historical inquiry but which centers

on logical philosophizing having the Aristotelian ideologies at the center. To explain this, Heidegger

made comparison between the experience of the factical life and the investigations of philosophy. The

concept of facticity so developed is such that facticity is authentic and would form a valid object of

research only when it involves ones own immediate time. Considering this, since philosophy is but a clear

interpretation of a life of facticity, it nature of inquiry become affected the happenings of the factic life.

Thus the method of hermeneutical phenomenology is bound to begin in the same manner as being bound

by the factic events. Since the above method is based on a pre-giveness, the interpretation is presumed as

being self-evident and clear without proper reference to origin. Thus if the history is inauthentic because

it dates to the past then this method is equally inauthentic.

There has been since history a various ways of viewing some philosophical insights but at the end

of the day, there seem to be the same kind of interpretation. Heidegger believes that this hermeneutical

phenomenology must free itself from this regress, uncover hidden and unexpressed motives thus find its

way back by means of destructive regression to the very primary motivating sources of exposition.

Hermeneutics can actualize this only by means of ‘destruction’. The implication here is that philosophical

research is essentially historical; yet it is equally essentially critical in regard to its history. Its destructive

confrontation with its history is not added merely as an illustration of how things once were. However,

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the destruction is rather the way in which the present in its basic movements has to be confronted in order

to assume original custody of one’s past to safeguard one’s root, in short to be7.

Based on this, one may not be very surprised seeing Aristotle’s idea of being and his psychology

taking a centre stage in the work of Martin Heidegger. Heidegger proposes a subjection of this Aristotle’s

work to thorough ‘destruction’ which gives the concept of the man’s Dasein to facticity (comprising of

both being in the world and being with others) instead of just life (as in Aristotle’s sense). With this, there

is a fall back to tradition which keeps Dasein from providing its own guidance, whether in inquiring or in

choosing8.

The concept of deconstruction in Heidegger’s thought began by as attempt by him to relate

between the questions of being with historicity. The historicality of Dasein can be hidden away from it

but Dasein can get through this hiddenness through its discovery of tradition and what it transmits.

Without this discovery, Dasein is denied the possibility of inquiring into history and discovering what the

past is like as to help shape the present. This inquiry is not just the inquiry into the meaning of being. It

must carry with itself an inquiry into the very inquiry of the meaning of being. It is in this later inquiry

that we encounter our past and thus take full hold of tradition.

Tradition however posses some issues to the inquiry into beingness by Dasein. When tradition

takes an upper hand in historical inquiry of being, there is a tendency of dogmatism in which things

received are given to the inquirer as self evident. According to Heidegger, it blocks our access to those

primordial sources from which the categories and concepts handed down to us have been in part quite

genuinely drawn9. That is to say that these givings of tradition makes feel very reluctant tracing the actual

primary origin of such ‘fact of being’ or rather even suppose that there is no need not understand these

historical sources. It is this incidence of tradition that seem to have truncated Dasein’s historical search

that it merely limits itself to the pattern of philosophizing which is rooted in the most alien and exotic of

cultures. Philosophy by this has no independent ground on which it can stand. With this Dasein is placed

in a position where it lacks the primary conditions which would make it possible for it to positively and

productively get back to the past.

The philosophical history which is built on the Greek thought pattern (it is in this Greek exotic

culture that Heidegger stressed that the history of philosophy was built) and history came up with issues

which seem to have contributed positively to the rediscovery of the lost fundamental ontology. Here we

refer back to the ego cogito of Descartes in the modern period. Descartes’ ego cogito seems a primary

guide to the philosophy that was to come after him. Though Descartes set these guides through the ego

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cogito, he never interrogated them as to their beings and structure in accordance with the thoroughgoing

way in which the question of being has been neglected10

. This is as a result of the contents of traditional

ontology which seem to streamline all thoughts in its formal system.

One at this juncture may not go far to get at the reason why Heidegger sought a deconstruction.

The tradition on which the philosophical history was built is faulty primarily since it forgot to build on a

foundation which should have set the theme of philosophy on a clearer plenum. This tradition which is so

tacitly protected must be loosened up for the question off being to be clear. Heidegger expressed thus:

If the question of being is to have its own history made transparent, then this hardened

tradition must be loosened up, and the concealments which it has brought about must be

dissolved. We understand this as task as one in which by taking the question of being as

a clue we are to destroy the traditional content of the ancient ontology until we arrive at

those primordial experiences in which we achieved our first ways of determining the

nature of being- the ways which have guided us ever since.11

If, following the above we, arrive at a given origin of our ontological concepts through our

investigations we shall successfully escape this constant but absurd individual ontological theorizing

which is prevalent in our philosophical system. This does not mean that the ontological tradition shall be

rubbished. No! The positive aspects of this tradition would be set out by keeping it within its limits and

showing forth how the meaning of being is formulated at the time. However, this does not also entail that

the deconstruction is relating itself towards the past; the criticism of the deconstruction is aimed at the

present- the now. The destruction of the history of ontology is essentially bound up with the way the

question of being is formulated and is possible within such a formulation.12

Heidegger understood his task of deconstruction as a bid to found the very foundation of ontology

by asking the fundamental question of being and by tracing it down to its very origin which other

philosophical theories had failed in. Having gained this ground, he like Descartes began to build on the

foundation he had laid. Heidegger saw the question of being as incomplete when it is divorced from time.

This understanding threw Descartes out of favour with him but instead brought Kant to a good light.

Heidegger praised Kant for his use of time in the explanation of the world in general and the beings in

particular. However, he quarreled with Kant’s seeming half-heartedness in the pursuit of his already set

task. The question of being must be through time this leads to a more concretization of the inquiry into

beingness in the first place.

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The question of being does not achieve its true concreteness until we have carried through the

process of destroying the ontological tradition13

. When this is done, we can then prove that the inquiry

into the meaning of being is unavoidable as far as our inquiry into ontology is concerned.

The concept of deconstruction which was projected by Heidegger has very great influence on the

thinkers after especially on Jacques Derrida. In the beginning of Derrida's work on deconstruction, he

brought forward the concept of différance. This is a rather complex term which makes reference to the

process of the production of difference and deferral. According to Derrida, all manner of difference and

presence get their base from the operation of différance. He thus stated:

To "deconstruct" philosophy... would be to think – in the most faithful, interior way

– the structured genealogy of philosophy's concepts, but at the same time to

determine – from a certain exterior... – what this history has been able to dissimulate

or forbid... By means of this simultaneously faithful and violent circulation between

the inside and the outside of philosophy [...a] putting into question the meaning of

Being as presence.14

To deconstruct philosophy entails thinking meticulously within philosophy about the very

concepts in philosophy following their structure and origin. Deconstruction, as it were, questions the

appeal to presence by arguing that there is constantly an irreducible aspect of absence in operation.

Derrida calls this aspect of absence différance. Différance is therefore a very crucial theoretical basis of

deconstruction. Deconstruction questions the basic operation of all kinds of philosophy by appealing to

presence and difference. Difference therefore suffuses all philosophy. Derrida argues along the above

point because "What defers presence [...] is the very basis on which presence is announced or desired in

what represents it, its sign, its trace".15

Différance therefore suffuses every philosophy since all

philosophy is constructed as a system through language. Différance is very important to language because

it makes available to philosophy "what metaphysics calls the sign (signified/signifier)".16

On one hand, a sign ought to point towards something that transcends itself that is its meaning in

such a manner that the sign is never fully present in itself but a deferral to something else- something

different. On the other hand, the structural relationship between the signified and signifier, as two related

but separate aspects of the sign, is brought about through differentiation. Derrida explains that différance

"is the economical concept", this entails that it is the concept of all systems and structures, hence "there is

no economy without différance... the movement of différance, as that which produces different things,

that which differentiates, is the common root of all the oppositional concepts that mark our language...

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différance is also the production... of these differences.17

Différance is therefore the condition for all

complex systems and as a matter of fact all philosophy to be possible.

Taking from the concept of différance, deconstruction is the description of how absence

problematises the operation of the appeal to presence within a particular philosophical system18

.

Différance is a-priori condition of possibility that is always already in effect but a deconstruction is

necessarily a careful description of how this différance is actually effective in a given text. Deconstruction

therefore explains problems in a text rather than creating them. Derrida seems to consider the illustration

of aporia in this manner as to be productive because it exposes the failure of the previous philosophical

systems and the necessity of continuous philosophizing through them with deconstruction.

Heidegger’s ontological deconstruction therefore set a foundation for the other philosophical

thoughts that came after him implicitly and explicitly. As I mentioned earlier, the success of his theory of

deconstruction has its root in the method that he employed in achieving it- the phenomenological method.

Let us therefore see hat this methodology is and how much this method is sustainable in his ontology

particularly and his philosophy at large.

4.2 Deconstructon and the Question of Method.

During our discourse on the exposition of Martin Heidegger’s Ontological Deconstruction in the

previous chapter, we saw that in the course of life, he gathered some influences that helped him develop

his work from his master and predecessor Edmund Husserl. Heidegger in the earlier part of the twentieth

century gave many lectures about the First Investigation of Husserl where he (Husserl) dealt with the

issue concerning ‘expression and meaning’.

Phenomenology by Husserl’s definition is “the study of experience and the ways in which things present

themselves in and through experience”19

. By this, phenomenology goes into the description of the

essential features or structures of a given experience or any experience in general. One of the central

structures of any experience as identified by Husserl is its intentionality, or its being directed toward

some object or experience. The theory of intentionality, which appears to be the central theme of

phenomenology of Husserl, holds that all experience necessarily has this object-relatedness and thus one

of the catch phrases of phenomenology is “all consciousness is consciousness of.” In sum, every

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experience we gather is always related to the world lest there is an abstraction which is repudiated by

phenomenology.

This stress on the nature of experience as intentional differentiates phenomenology from other

modern epistemological approaches that have a strong separation between the experiencing perceiver and

the object encountered. Beginning with Descartes, this problem of subject/object distinction produced the

traditions of rationalism and empiricism which concentrates on one of these aspects of experience at the

expense of the other. But phenomenology offers a mode for redirection to these traditions by providing an

account of “how the experiencing subject and object experienced are not externally related, but internally

unified”. This unified relation between the perceiver and the object of perception is the “phenomena”. It is

this phenomena that stands as the starting point of the descriptive analysis of phenomenology.

Phenomenology as a historical trend originates with Edmund Husserl (1859-1938). He is

considered the “father” of phenomenology and as such he worked tirelessly to establish it as a rigorous

science. As Husserl’s phenomenological investigations deepened, he began to develop the descriptive

phenomenology of his earlier work into a transcendental phenomenology. This “transcendental turn” was

accompanied by two methodological clarifications through the concepts of the epoché and the reduction.

The epoché is a methodological shift in one’s attitude from naively accepting a certain dogmatic beliefs

about the world.

Husserl, further, became interested in the occasional expressions upon which theories can be built

and which are not dependent on any circumstance for their meaning, as distinct from the objective

expressions. These occasional expressions constitute, however, a conceptually unified group of

expressions that require an orientation of their meanings to the speaker’s situation and the occasion

(Gelegenheit) in which they are altered.20

The use of these occasional expressions produces two

meanings: the indicating meaning which is used to a connotation bound in the second meaning- the

indicated meaning. An expression, hereof, drags the listener to the circumstance of the speaker who

makes reference to himself/herself. Occasional expressions are ambiguous. This is because in their

indexical forms, they seem to hide a lot of meanings. The sun is hot, for instance, does not give you any

other issue about this hot sun or why the expression. It could be that the sun gets the skin burnt or that the

weather is hotter compared to another area. The statements are merely fixed to the very context of their

being made.

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Husserl tried to clarify this further by attempting to demonstrate the reasons for the ambiguity

of such statements. According to him, the ambiguity stems from the fact that the sequence of indication is

not the same for the speaker and the hearer. In making such statements, the speaker is already aware of

what is being indicated. However, the situation of the hearer is different. Any reference by the speaker

leaves the hearer only to the general thought. This makes sense at the level of presenting a tangible object

but appears questionable when applied to the conceptual level. The goal of this occasional expression is

clear; it is not a general indicator of meaning but an intuitive fulfillment in the meaning indication.

Heidegger’s method became an understanding of Husserl’s method though with a different

conceptual scheme. Thus it is pointless if the indicating meaning does not direct one to the full expression

of what is meant. That is to say that the indicating meaning has not fulfilled itself and therefore denies

true meaning. Heidegger seems to jettison this clear presuppositionless understanding of Husserl but

instead surmised that an assertion is a derivative mode of understanding. Heidegger was explicit on this in

the section 33 of his Being and Time as he expressed that understanding is equiorimordially with

disposition and talk, a fundamental mode of the being in the world and its characterization by its future-

directedness which it makes manifest the Dasein constantly projects possibility for itself.21

No doubt, Husserl and Heidegger accepted the phenomenological method but differed in the

employment of the method. The premises of Heidegger in which he believed, unlike Edmund Husserl,

that philosophical terminology could not be divorced from the history of the use of that terminology, and

thus genuine philosophy could not avoid confronting questions of language and meaning, became a point

of divergence between Husserl and himself (Heidegger). It becomes clear that the existential analysis of

being in relation to time by Heidegger is but the primary step in his philosophy geared towards a

transformation of the philosophical language and meaning, which would have rendered the existential

analytic limited in every case.

The entry point of Heidegger’s metaphysics was a direct attempt to pitch his tent with

existentialism. While existentialism can be traced back to the influences by the writings of Søren

Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Fyodor Dostoevsky, it was at the point of publication of

Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927) that many existential themes were introduced into the

phenomenological trend. Existential phenomenology undertakes the question of meaning in the context of

live world (lebenswelt) or experience. The central theme hereof is that the field of phenomenological

investigation is not based on the theoretical exercise which concentrates on the cognitive features of

knowledge. Instead, the ultimate ground of meaning is discovered in the meaning of being and existence

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i

which is a question that can only be posed in the context of the ordinary and everyday encounter with

one’s own beingness.

Heidegger, despite his blatant rejection of the label of existentialism, his central work Being and

Time became reputed to be the central inspiration for subsequent articulations of existential

phenomenology. By serving under Husserl for a long time both as a student and eventually a successor,

Heidegger was handed a privileged position of being exposed to the various dimensions of

phenomenological investigation and as such, he introduced them to his work. “For example, Heidegger’s

conception of being-in-the-world is considered to be an elaboration of Husserl’s theory of intentionality

within a practical sphere”. Heidegger, nevertheless, failed to consider the practical aspect of

intentionality- introduced by Husserl, to be one among others. Instead he generated the argument that

one’s “average everyday” comportment to the world is ultimate intentional relation upon which all others

are grounded or rooted.

Heidegger appreciated phenomenology taking it as a worthy force with which he will re-interpret

one of the age- long issues of the metaphysical tradition: ontology. Ontology, a study of being qua being

(being for its own sake), is very important in the development of any metaphysical idea little wonder then

Heidegger’s reactivation of the question of being become a celebrated event in twentieth-century

philosophy. And since the question of being had become concealed within the degenerative tradition of

the history of Western metaphysics, Heidegger sought to provide a preparatory analysis so as to escape

the trappings of that tradition. With this the task of his phenomenology was set right.

Thus While Husserl sought to explain the essential characteristics and structures of sort of

experience Heidegger overturned his phenomenological studies from essentialist tradition laid down by

Husserl. For Heidegger, understanding always involves some elements of hermeneutics. Heidegger, at

this juncture, labeled his phenomenology a “hermeneutic phenomenology.” In Being and Time,

Heidegger tried to show the structures of how Dasein interprets its sense of being which brought about

the idea of the universality of hermeneutics and existentialism inherent in his phenomenology.

The result of this came in his analysis of existence superseding the essence and thus for one to

think of the essence first, one must consider the existence first. The above understanding became the

foundation on which Heidegger developed his thesis on beingness. In order to achieve a proper

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development of this thesis, Heidegger employed the phenomenological method of inquiry. His

understanding and usefulness of phenomenology is discovered in these statements:

[T]he term phenomenology expresses a maxim which can be formulated as to the things

in themselves! It is opposed to taking over any conceptions which only seem to have

been demonstrated; it is opposed to those pseudo-questions, which parade themselves as

problems often for generations at a time. Yet this maxim… is abundantly self-evident and

it expresses, moreover, the underlying principle of every scientific knowledge

whatsoever.22

Evidently, Heidegger prefigured hiddenness- lethe- as a very major foundational condition for his

inquiry into the problem of ‘Being’. One may not, at this juncture, find it hard to understand why

Heidegger insists on the phenomenological method of inquiry if at all the work would be ontological.

Each being based on its ontological structure is perfect within its ontological understanding. Heidegger

perceived that by the hermeneutical investigation into the issue of beings he will have made a great step in

achieving his task of ‘being analysis’.

The success of Heidegger’s phenomenological method lay on the formal indication in which the

employment of hermeneutics is essential to the grasping of the real nature of things. Paul Ricoeur

appreciates the hermeneutical undertone of Heidegger’s phenomenological system as a system fore

shadowed by the Husserl’s phenomenological method. According to Ricoeur, because the matter of being

has been covered up, phenomenology does not have simple ocular access to it and thus it becomes part of

the struggle against dissimulation23

.

Moreover, so as to successfully unravel that ‘being’ which has been covered or hidden, Martin

Heidegger built himself round the very original source of the western thought. This gave him a clue to the

‘hermeneutics of logos’ which we could conclude rightly that it is fashioned after Aristotle’s critique of

the Platonic dialectics. To say in brief, a hermeneutical phenomenology is wary of the solidification of

original experiences of factual life into assertions that can be handed (uber lie fort) as something present-

at-hand such that access to those experiences gets blurred or even shrouded in complete vagueness. Thus

for Heidegger, the phenomenological question is not a question of what? But the question of how? He

stated:

Phenomenology signifies primarily a methodological conception. This expression does

not characterize the what of the objects of philosophical research as a subject-matter, but

rather the how of that…24

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The above statement of Heidegger notwithstanding, one still finds himself confronted by the

problem of gaining access to the very question of ‘Being’ without the blemish of involving oneself again

with the covering of the same, since one must be exposed to the usage of words thereby still handling

those words that aid to project the assertions.

The ‘how’ question which Heidegger reserved for the province of phenomenology gets us back to

the question of methodology. Heidegger evidently can never be praised for clarity in his methodology.

His attempt to use the phenomenological method instead made his work obscure. However, we may have

come too early to point this out; nevertheless we can envisage from Hans Gadamer’s work Truth and

Method that Heidegger’s method is counterposed to any successful approach to truth. Passing a sentence

on Heidegger with regard to his method may be much too early for now since his task seems to be double

faced as he battles with the question of Being and trying not to cover what we are trying to uncover. In as

much as we are not likely to nail him for this, another question which may not quickly leave our eyes is:

did Heidegger actually follow his recommendation on the issue of the function of his phenomenological

method? Heidegger elaborated that phenomenology asks the question of how? But to what extent did

Heidegger explain this ‘how’ question of his in his phenomenological inquiry into ontology (which he

eventually reduced to man, a problem which defeats its own aim)?

Heidegger initiated his studies by attempting to explain what Being is. His general analysis of

Being envelops everything in existence and whose being has the possibility of reference. The reference

hereof is necessary in the conception of Being because, according to Heidegger, any inquiry, as a kind of

seeking, must be guided before hand by what is sought. Therefore, the meaning of being must already be

available to us in a certain manner. First of all, these beings, as understood in general, make the world as

whole. The understanding of the beingness of these entities, by their classical understanding as obscure,

does not give any lead to their understanding. However what we seek in our attempt to understand being

is not something hidden, despite the seeming difficulty in grasping it at first attempt, since being is that

which determines entities as entities but are not entities themselves. Going by this, Being is a being of

entities and what is to be found out is the meaning of being as contrasting with the concepts in which

entities acquire their determinate signification.

To arrive at the solution to the problem of understanding Being, Heidegger introduces a being

whose asking of this question of being is the very mode of his being. As such:

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It gets an existential character from what is inquired about namely, being. This entity

which each of us is himself and which includes inquiring as one of the possibilities of its

being, we shall denote by the term Dasein 25

.

The being of Dasein comes up significantly in Heidegger’s work to perfect the inquiry into the

meaning of being. He furthered this by clarifying the ‘Being’ of that being which answers the question

about other beings, this is Dasein- the being there. He quite understands that previous ontologies have

been tempted a lot to see man as merely an object in the world instead of as a modality. Thus Heidegger

prescribes the way he wants Dasein to be seen. In his definition, he sees Dasein as a being that “comports

itself understandingly towards Being and has a relationship with Being as a being with and becomes for

itself a being, whose ‘Being’ is an issue for it” 26

.

Dasein shows forth as man who is gifted with rationality; hence his understanding of man-

(Dasein) as ‘ζώου λογoυ εχoυ’- rational animal. The above adoption by Martin Heidegger brings out

evidently a uniqueness and context independent character to the indication of Dasein much like Husserl’s

use of essentially occasional expressions like intentionality. The work of Heidegger, as is explainable by

his method, indicates the Being of Dasein as understanding the very concept of potentiality-for-Being.

The potentiality so mentioned indicates an apparent incompleteness of Dasein who tries to always

transcend himself towards the future as he continually goes in search of possibilities for itself. Hermann

explains this clearer:

The concept which Heidegger tries to develop about the Dasein especially In the

Being and Time is such that the Dasein is a being that is futuristic. This quality

makes the Dasein into a being which is constantly possible not actual in the strict

sense of it. It is in this possibility that the Dasein understands itself and likewise

other beings in the world…27

Heidegger conceives the world as an existential world (a world outside oneself), thus we would

be correct to adduce that so long as man remains a continually projecting being, this continuity in

projection would extend to other activities of man. Thus man can never exhaust all projections in an

attempt to solve the basic issues facing him, basic issues of which man himself is one. In the section

twenty five (§25) of his work, Heidegger explained that he has just formally indicating the ontological

constitutive state of Dasein and that to consider the ‘I’ which Descartes had hidden in his ‘cogito ergo

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sum’, he employed a general indication, general enough to accommodate the various forms of the ‘I’

including the ‘I’ as it exists at the time of no –longer-being-in-the-world.

The task of analyzing the ‘how’ as against the ‘what’, may appear very difficult since in an

analysis of this sort, we do not have any palpable or phenomenal object which may serve as the object of

our inquiry or that give us content from which we can generalize or form general conclusions. However,

no matter how helpful such inquiry appears to be, it may not stand its ground in philosophical thought. It

then falls back to philosophy as a task to take up that which other disciplines cannot clearly accomplish

namely: to take up the object of its investigation by examining its meaning to comprehend it better. This

drives home James Christians’ definition of philosophy as a situation and an activity.

The phenomenological method of Martin Heidegger is a principle of disclosedness. This

disclosedness emancipates us from lethe- hiddenness to a new concept through which knowledge is got-

namely aletheia- truth (aletheia spoken of is a truth distinct from the Latin concept- vera which deals

with the epistemological aspect of truth. The concept of aletheia is a deeper one hinged on revelation;

hence, Heidegger’s concept of phenomenology as αποφαινεσθαι τα φαινομενα- disclosedness of

phenomena28

. The disclosure of things by themselves to man necessitates a natural ‘epoche’ (in the

worlds of Edmund Husserl) which makes everyone get a clear personal view of the world as it is. Sequel

to this Hans Gadamer points out that our own understanding of the universe awakens in us the vision of

the things that we ourselves are trying to say.29

Thus, it is easier now to explain what preoccupation

Heidegger has given to Dasein as the being to whom the Being of other is the case.

The basic preoccupation of Dasein is not in actuality but in potentiality. If we go by this then, the

attempt of Dasein to understand becomes disclosedness. For Martin Heidegger’s understanding involves a

disclosedness, which is the laying-open, of what there is possible for Dasein. Disclosure connotes

bringing forth possibilities which may have been seen as impossible into the open.

Analyzing Heidegger’s disclosedness would show us another intrinsic character which it

possesses the character of meaning. For Dasein to make meaning out of his understanding, it projects it-

self towards the object of disclosure and thereof makes it understandable. This idea projected by Martin

Heidegger appears to be very much in line with the Kantian notion of how meanings are got by the

perceiver from various phenomenal objects perceived. In his Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant

explained how meanings are got. Contrary to his predecessors who are of the opinion that the object of

perception gives itself to the senses to perceive, Kant in his ‘Copernican revolution’ explained that the

objects of perception play passive role in acquiring meaning. The mind (person) super-imposes its

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categories on the object of perception and thus from them elicit meaning. Nevertheless, the issue at this

point does not lie on how correct the above is, but how this meaning is got through the projection of

Dasein’s possibility.

The above brings up the problem of understanding. Understanding here is authentic. It is an order

within which comprehension of things are made. With a good understanding of a number of things, the

interpretations of the understood things are made. In the interpretation of the province of the activities of

the being-in-the-world, Heidegger is careful not to make things too common for Dasein. But with the

introduction of ‘assertion’ Heidegger imagines that Dasein who asserts and who now makes tangible the

result of the ‘how’ would be seeing these things as being present-at-hand instead of learning it with its

pre-theoretical structure. Thus, the projection into the many possibilities of Dasein becomes obscure with

the assertion now losing its disclossedness and its original understanding. For instance, to talk is a

fundamental mode of disclosure. If, however, assertion merely passed along without the object of

disclosure then there is a total loss of the truth of the assertion. To say the least, assertion is dangerous.

The presence of the above mentioned activity of man-‘assertion’- evidently plays up the issue of

truth. In a sense, the presence of ‘assertion’ tends towards mutilating the truth of our understanding.

Sequel to this, we may not be wrong to insinuate that our attempt to disclose the total implications out of

which spring Martin Heidegger’s assertions, an assertion from which the human existence emerges, is

prone to misappropriation. And if our insinuations are right, then the whole attempt at getting the truth of

the matter regarding the Heidegger’s Dasein is bound to fail.

Nevertheless, Heidegger may not readily concede to the fact that every employment of an

‘assertion’ automatically ends in hopelessness and suggests out right misuse. No he may still give some

hope of finding the truth through language. The role of assertion is central in getting the truth. In

accepting this, Heidegger, unlike some western philosophers, who believe that ‘assertion’ is a locus of

truth, chooses truth as the locus of ‘assertion’ instead. Thus from the foundation of truth one could make

assertions. Little wonder he explains that a more authentic analysis of being investigates ‘that on the basis

of which beings are already understood30

. From the above statement, we would see through his work a

deep understanding of truth-aletheia, which, for him, is the first and fore most uncovering of realities out

of the dark. It is a disclosure par excellence.

‘Assertion’ plays a very important role in disclosure. Dasein expresses itself in the beings

present-at-hand in the form of assertion. On the other hand, the things that Dasein disclose by its

understanding and interpretation point them out in assertion. Thus the phenomenological function which

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includes asking the question ‘how’ is made clearer. Therefore, if we become more interested, like in the

traditional metaphysics, in the things as they are disclosed, then we may end up seeing only the subject

matter as it shows itself in the assertion and perhaps in the context of their use. However, if we become

more interested in the process of ‘Being-uncovering’, we become more acquainted with the more

primordial realm in which the subject- matter was first experienced and was brought forth in the

disclosure of a multiplicity of possibilities. In the final analysis, without the irretrievability of the rich

experience that ‘Being-uncovering’ indicates, the ‘Being-uncovered’ will not be grasped as it really is.

Truth cannot be easily ripped off from entities. Entities are, therefore, not seen from very

restricted views but instead they are seen as they disclose themselves. Asserting something does not really

make that thing αληθεια (self- evident). For something to be properly true by ‘assertion’, it must exceed,

as Ernest Tugendhart stated, mere givenness of some entity. Assertion provides us with a direction that

takes us from the subject matter to its self-relation! Assertions have more to them than merely the

givenness of the entity because they also connote the subject matter the object of interest. The assertion

shifts our attention from the subject-matter to the process of disclosure of a particular subject. This task of

assertion, Tugendhart further maintained, is unique since it not only gives insight into a conclusive

assertion but also to the one that bears a truth-relation and leads along the way to truth31

. But the issue of

‘Being-in-the-uncovering’, as against the ‘Being-uncovered’ gets back to what Husserl explained as the

existence of the primordial experience of truth in his defense of the phenomenological method. The above

makes clear what Heidegger tried to delineate in the methodology which he claimed to employ in the

‘Being and Time.

Nonetheless, if we follow the set methodology of Martin Heidegger, we shall see there in a

modest work which may have been interpreted to mean what it is not. But, since, the methodology of

Martin Heidegger in the Being and Time could be explained as a formal indication and not some

metaphysical theorization understood as the very attempt to give a comprehensive account of the basic

‘attributes’ of the human person we can conclude that it is nothing but an empty book. No matter how

hard this may appear, it is evident that the method of Heidegger renders the work an empty intention

which anticipates in an unsteady fulfillment.

Heidegger in a bid to defend his methodology, which he evidently borrowed, but claimed

ownership, explains that we must first of all presuppose truth, which can be understood as the

disclosedness of Dasein in all our actions. Truth, in fact, makes possible any presupposition even though

it is not provable. In so far as we are the beings that disclose ‘Being’, we are in such a way that not

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believing that there is truth makes living impossible. Furthermore, in Heidegger’s emphasizes his

understanding of temporality, which accordingly aids one remember always the fundamental character of

one’s own existence in which one operates everyday with an ontic familiarity while remaining

ontologically distant. This quite acceptable still leaves some questions open: What then is the basis of this

repetition which Heidegger prescribed? This is a question which Heidegger never attempts to answer

throughout his discourse in the Being and Time.

The question of the method which Heidegger tries to utilize, he may have believed, is persuasive

enough to convince human beings who he believes would come to know themselves and understand their

lives all the way. The human being, through the events of his pasts, reconciles some of his actions and

makes better for the future. Everything manifests itself both within and without Dasein. However, we

may not be ready to accept the originality of Heidegger’s method; and we may not, at the same time, be

entirely wrong to conclude that Heidegger’s clear attempt to cover his tracks evidently exposed his

method to many loopholes which he could not really do away with.

However, the use to which Heidegger the phenomenological method is great and innovative. He

explains in camera the objectivity of the human world view. This human world- view is practically

tailored towards an authentic existence which one acquires by his predisposition towards death and the

life one lives as a temporal being. For sure, every human being is quite aware of the fact of his destiny,

which Heidegger limits at death. Thus, Ernest Becker, in his work the Denial of Death, points out the

reason for one’s effort as a dance towards a heroic destiny stating that the common instinct of mankind

for reality has always led to heroic actions and thus from the world into a theatre for heroism32

. So to

speak, Heidegger believes that the whole action of human life is a shift towards death; and as such, the

whole of the human existence must be grounded in life assertiveness, which leads to authenticity. The

above gives a clue to the next problem coming up shortly on the discourse of the phenomenology of death

in Heidegger.

4.3 Temporality/ Death in Heidegger.

Death is often taken for granted in the field of academic discourse because of the dreadful blow it

has given to man as a historical being. Nevertheless, the issue seems to be in continuous recurrence in the

field of metaphysics even though strictly speaking it is not mentioned as such. Now and then in classical

metaphysics and philosophy of religion, philosophy seems to discourse more, what happens after death or

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even raise questions as to the fact of life after death and as such questions the origin of man and what the

end of man would be like. The above ends up in speculation and even skepticism for philosophers whose

ideology revolves round the rationalism and consistency.

The problem of death becomes even more problematic looking through its gatelessness and which

renders it very impossible for any phenomenological investigation. Heidegger acknowledges in the

section 49 of the Being and Time the difficulty in dealing with the problem of death and the possibility of

getting through such an inquiry as such. He says:

The unequivocal character of our ontological interpretation of death must first be

strengthened by our bringing explicitly to mind what such an interpretation cannot

inquire about and what it would be vain to expect it to give us any information or

instruction about.33

Heidegger began hiss treatment of death from an ontological stand point. For him to trace death

of Dasein we must have to understand what exactly life is. As such Heidegger categorically stated that

“death in the widest sense of it is the phenomenon of life”34

. Life, Heidegger understands, is such a being

that belongs to Dasein as a being in the world. The above understanding which Heidegger projects, shows

his existential undertone which we shall revisit later on in the course of this work. Life is not just a

possession of Dasein but that which makes Dasein what it is. Life gives to Dasein its existential and

ontological structure. The above brings forth the real nature of Dasein as a being among other beings.

Heidegger shows this in the various understanding of man in relation to death: the biological and

the physiological understanding. Dasein here is to live and die like other beings. Here we check the length

of life of all the beings man and other animals alike equally the kind of death, causes of death, growth

patterns and even the nature of growth is also ascertained. This is achieved through the ontical

functionality of Dasein. The leading statement of Heidegger evidently raises a problem of how we can

ontologically relate this death in relation to life. Heidegger addresses this problematic by playing up the

need to sketch out the preliminary conception of death by Dasein’s ontology.

Heidegger placed the ontology of Dasein over and above the ontology life. By this, Dasein exists

and from Dasein’s existence, Dasein’s life is traced. It is from this phenomenon of Dasein’s living that

one will more conveniently trace the nature of the death of Dasein and indeed what this sort of end bears

in Dasein’s existence. The treatment of death and life in the Being and Time must be adjudged technical

at this juncture. However the understanding of Heidegger’s treatment here is interesting all the same.

What Heidegger sought to do was simple. He saw death as a phenomenon which may not be successfully

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explained without reference to the dying subject and most importantly the very existential character of

such a being.

The above investigation and study which Heidegger carried on led him to the conclusion that

despite the ontic-biological concept of death in relation to Dasein, the Dasein does not go through its end

in the way other beings – lower animals, trees, and so on do. Dasein can end just like every other being

but this sort of end is not like perishing or annihilation. The end of Dasein is a kind of transition or

demise. From here we can understand that dying therefore is a way of being in which Dasein is toward

death. Dasein can demise but not perish. With this Heidegger went on to re assert the role of biology in

the analysis of Dasein in relation to Death. He expresses this thus:

Accordingly we must say that Dasein never perishes. Dasein, however, can demise

only as long as it is dying. Medical and biological investigation into demising can

obtain results which may even become significant ontologically if the basic orientation

for an existential interpretation of death has been made secure. Or must sickness and

death in general – even from a medical point of view – be primarily conceived as

existential phenomena? 35

It is clear that the existential analysis of death, according to Heidegger, takes pre- eminence over

any sort of biological (as includes the physical study of the Dasein) and ontology of life but at the same

time, it (existential analysis of death) is a foundation for any sort of investigation into death be it

historiological, biological, psychological or ethnological. This suggests that in any form of

characterization under which this demise is encountered, there is primarily a presupposition of death.

Albeit, a psychological study of the act of dying, provides more information about the act of living of the

dying person. Heidegger thus points out that the fact that when Dasein dies… it does no have to do so

with an experience of its factical demising, or in such experience.36

Thus, the way people react to death

show ultimately the understanding of Dasein; but there is need for an existential analytic and existential

conception of death for the interpretation of the understanding of Dasein.

Heidegger who explains the real nature of death and the existential intricacies left many things

being anticipated. One wonders how the existential analysis of death relates to the existential life of

Dasein who as a matter of fact anticipates its end authentically and what makes this anticipation and

authenticity what they are in the first place. Many questions, here upon, arises as to the realistic nature of

this treatment of death arises here.

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i

Many philosophers’ question as to the realistic nature of this treatment of death necessitates their

argument that death is a destruction of the human race. This idea for them is so clear since the

phenomenological study of death can only be carried out from the reactions of the surrounding

individuals towards the demise of their friend. At this juncture, the phenomenological study shifts sharply

to a seeming vague anthropological inquiry into the menace of death. But after all these, death still

remains both scientifically and ontologically relevant to the existence of man in the world.

To attempt sorting out this problem, Martin Heidegger in the 20th century sought to clear off the

issue of ‘beingness’ from which Dasein would be traced as a historical being which is with a possibility

of coming to an end or being- no longer- in, at death. For Martin Heidegger, Dasein’s full nature is

realized because of the existence of death. To say the least, Dasein actions, nature and possibility are

made explainable in Dasein’s temporality which is summarized in death. Dasein’s death is particular to

the Dasein and Dasein lives as a being towards death without which Dasein’s whole life is rendered

inauthentic. In brief, Dasein is a being meant to live an authentic life. This authentic life is achieved when

Dasein continuously transcends itself to live a life towards an end which is achieved in Dasein’s death.

Heidegger starts the discourse on death but not just independently as such. For Martin Heidegger,

the beginning of every study must focus on the foundation which is on the question of being. This is his

work Introduction to Metaphysics. Heidegger here raised a thought provoking question: “why is there

something instead of nothing at all?”37

The above question raised by Heidegger, even though it came in

the later writing, seems to form the very foundation to every philosophical inquiry. The whole

philosophical discipline especially existentialism sees in this all important question of Heidegger a foot

hold for operation, a raw material for the generation of thought.

Building on this foundation, Martin Heidegger sees in the philosophy of his predecessors a

neglect of this question, a result which impacted negatively on philosophy and metaphysics. The inquiry

into “beingness” which Aristotle and Plato contributes to, according to Heidegger, got destroyed by the

forgetfulness of ‘being’ which suffuses the field of metaphysics after them till the time of Hegel. The

vexation of Heidegger becomes deeper as he realizes the superfluousness with which the question of

being of all concepts was handled. The result of this becomes a resistance to every attempt at a definition.

Thus Heidegger sees the need to plunge back and inquire into this all important but forgotten concept of

being.

The question of being is embedded in the very concept of anything one can ever conjecture or/and

apprehend in any entity. Thus it transcends mere categorization as class or genius. Evidently, the concept

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of being which was held by Heidegger is akin to or at least is borrowed from the ancient discourse on the

Aristotle an ‘ousia’, which acknowledged the ambiguity of the term being and thus explained being in

terms of unity and diversity. Therefore we cannot conceive being as just an entity. Heidegger argues that

the ambiguous nature of the concept ‘being’ ipso facto makes it necessary to raise the question of being in

the first place.

The above understanding of Heidegger brings up deductively the question “how”? This question

supersedes everything and leads to the activities of the inquirer- man. For him, to work out the question of

being adequately, we must provide an entity which asks the question of being. The very task of

questioning ‘being’ gives this inquiring being its essential character and mode of being. He called

‘Dasein’. Thus, for clear formulation of the question of being, ‘Dasein’ must be explained with regard to

its nature as a being within timeness.

This Heidegger’s argument shows some evidence of difficulty in comprehension as some

philosophers – Symberberg saw it as an argument in a circle 38

. But he seemed to have grasped this early

enough explaining that such accusations are rendered sterile when concrete investigations are in question.

Thus, for Heidegger, one can determine the nature of entities in their being without necessarily having the

explicit concept of the meaning of being at one’s disposal. This epistemological disposition to the

understanding of being at once presents to us the very nature of Dasein- man as a being around which the

understanding of being revolves. Thus, Dasein gives meaning to ‘being’, understands itself and its

temporal nature as the gate way to the understanding of being qua tare.

On the discovery of Dasein- a being which asks the question of Being- Heidegger relegated, in

his work Being and Time, the whole activity of the universe as a temporal order to the ‘Being’ of Dasein.

Dasein, for Martin Heidegger, is at the centre of the study of ‘being’. To understand the world of beings,

Dasein must be understood. However, this does not mean that the understanding of being is at man’s

disposal. Man, on the contrary, stands as an observer while interpreting Being as it discloses itself

phenomenologically to him.

Nevertheless, Dasein has a life to live within this temporal universe that keeps opening itself to it

as events which equally affect him. This leads to the existential analysis of Dasein. In the existential

explication of Dasein, Heidegger sees a being which linguistically could be said ‘to be’. The rigors of the

explanation of the being of Dasein as a being that ontologically exists is fully represented in the

etymology of the term-being which Heidegger sought to explain without much ambiguity.

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Man/Dasein is, according to Heidegger, being-in-the world. As a being in the world, man finds

himself thrown into the world without his pre-concept or choice. In this thrownness, Dasein begins

making very conscious effort to know or better still, understand the world where they find themselves. It

is in this understanding that the journey of Dasein starts.

Dasein’s existence is modeled in temporality. As a being within timeness, Dasein lives its life in

three moments namely: facicity, existence and throwness. Living in the moment of throwness, Dasein

lives its past. Here the fact of its thrownness makes it strive for an authentic life style which is achieved

by the extrication of the self from the general ‘they’. This effort is culminated in ‘existence which is when

Dasein lives the present. In the life of the present, Dasein tries always to transcend itself by projecting

itself always towards the future and going beyond what is to what is not39

. The result of this is seen in the

imperfection of Dasein. Dasein sees itself in fallenness as a being- towards- an- end. These three

moments reveal themselves in the phenomenon of death. Thus, Dasein is explained here as the being-

towards-an-end.

In the ontological explanation of Dasein as the Being- in- the- world, Dasein maintains itself

essentially in a deservering. This deserverance is impossible to be crossed over by Dasein. This

deservrance of Dasein (as a being within space) makes it comport itself towards the world and itself.

Dasein, from the description of Heidegger, becomes guided within its universe of time and space which

naturally renders it limited in its nature.

The previous section of this work identified the three moments of the life of Dasein, which

manifests in Dasein’s end-death. Each of these three moments points continuously towards the fact that

the end is at hand and is impending for Dasein. Death is not something, not yet; it is rather something

which stands before us. Death is the phenomenon of life so long as Dasein is considered as life. Death is

therefore the possibility of Dasein.

The possibility-death focuses upon the very being of Dasein such that man accepts it as his own-

most-possibility. At death, Dasein is cut up with the possibility of no-longer-being-able-to-be-there.

Dasein at death is cut off from its relationship with others thus death is understood in brief by Heidegger

as the possibility is of the absolute impossibility of Dasein. According to him:

Death is the possibility of the absolute impossibility of Dasein…it reveals itself

as that possibility which is one’s own most which is non-relational, and which is

not to be outstripped. As such death is something distinctively impendin40

.

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The above qualities which include non-relationality and non-outstripped are not procured by

Dasein for itself. At existence, Dasein finds itself already thrown into this possibility. By this thrownness,

there is a revelation of Dasein’s reaction to the issue of death; a reaction which manifests itself in the

state-of-mind-anxiety. This state of mind so mentioned must not be confused with fear in the face of one’s

demise.

Anxiety does not entail a random mood of weakness or inaction. It is that which characterizes

Dasein as a being-towards-an-end. One who is anxious is not anxious towards a particular object but

anxious about a state of affairs. In fear, one is afraid of a particular thing. This fear often deters man and

makes him function against his modes. Anxiety as mode of Dasein towards death makes Dasein instead

active to living a life of authenticity, a life towards death. This life is personal to Dasein and Dasein’s

ability to accept this makes it authentic in existence.

While discoursing this authenticity of Dasein, Martin Heidegger did not fail to point out the

manner of authenticity in the life of Dasein towards death. In the life of inauthenticity, Dasein is said to

exist as the ‘they-self’ and thus loses its mines to which it is ontologically given. The ‘they’ is nothing

definite but that is what all of us are though not as a sum. In brief, the inauthentic existence is where

everyone is the other and no one himself41

.

This mode of existence equips man with the various means by which he avoids the contemplation

of death. In the inauthentic life, death is treated according to Heidegger as one of the events in the world

which happens to others and not oneself. Death is treated as an actuality here, more than

potentiality/possibility. Thus if one should consider death as empirical reality only, then death will have a

very great impact on one. Viewing death as an actuality entails viewing only the death of others not one’s

own death. On the other hand, an authentic existence sees death as a potentiality, a reality which he must

confront.

Authentic existence consists in the belief that one must die someday but on a situation to be

considered in the nearest future. This means that the death which is essentially mine in such a way that no

one can take one’s place in it is perverted into an activity of the public which the ‘crowd-they’ encounter.

Inauthentic existence gives its approval and aggravates the temptation to cover up from oneself one’s

own-most-being towards death. It is an evasive concealment in the face of death that dominates

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everydayness so stubbornly that in being with one another Dasein gets back to the tranquilized

everydayness of the world.

Heidegger’s contention here is that it is only the awareness of death and our attitudes towards it

that make authentic existence possible. The anticipation of Dasein’s finitude brings it home to itself and

further brings it face to face with its beingness. An authentic existence is achieved by one who is fully

aware of his ability ‘to be’ which encompasses within itself the possibility of not being-able-to-be. In

brief, anticipation is that which confers on man the sense of his individuality, since death as one’s own-

most-possibility is non-relational. Dasein is authentically itself only in so far as it is able to realize its

uniqueness. Dasein anticipates its death as an authentic existent.

This anticipation, according to Heidegger, is different from expectation even though the duo

involves a looking forward. However, expecting death does not paint a valid picture of the futuristic

understanding of death. Expectation entails the full knowledge of what one is looking forward to. This

does not make sense in the issue of death, since the gatelessness of death makes it meaningless to expect

it. One can, for instance, expect the return of his goods which he ordered of course not what he has not

ordered or does not know. Anticipation goes with some level of uncertainly and lack of knowledge as we

can see in the anticipation of the second coming of Christ.

Anticipation in this discourse of Heidegger wrenches Dasein from the popular life style and

brings the possibility of death very close to it. At this level, Dasein is given nothing to actualize or what

to be as an actual entity. It is a possibility of the impossibility of every way of comporting oneself

towards anything. It is in anticipation that the possibility of death reveals itself as that which knows no

measure at all. Anticipation is a possibility of understanding one’s own-most and uttermost patentability-

for-being, an authentic existence. This is so because in the anticipatory possibility, the finitude of man is

brought home to him. The above gives man the freedom to choose between being authentic or inauthentic

in his existence- resoluteness.

In the light of the above, Gelven explains that authentic existence is achieved by one who is fully

aware of one’s ability ‘to be’ which includes the possibility of his not being-able-to-be while choosing a

reaction towards this reality42

. Anticipation confers on Dasein the sense of Dasein’s individuality since

death as one’s own-most-possibility is non-relational. This, Dasein is authentically itself when it is able to

realize its uniqueness to confront death as care.

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The issue of care raised by Heidegger brings up another quality of Dasein which calms its anxiety

while anticipating death. Care, because of the ontical representation of it in the work of Heidegger, lacks

its pre-textual meaning as that which is in contradistinction from care-freeness (Sorglosigkeit) or as worry

(Besorgnis). However it does not have an independent existence from the various moments of Dasein’s

activity. It exists as attachments to the three moments mentioned earlier are existentiality, facticity and

fallenness. Care does not stand in isolation from the attitude of the ‘self’. Thus care entails concern and

solicitude (fursorge). It is in this concern that Dasein manifests itself as a Being-already-in and a-Being-

with-others.

Care lies ‘a priori’ and constantly before every attitude of Dasein and in every situation. Being

concern and solitude are gives Dasein a willingness in which one gets oneself down to projection into

death. Heidegger practically pointed out(that) in willing, an entity which s understood-that is, which has

been projected upon its possibility-gets seized upon, either as something with which one may concern

oneself, or as something which is to be brought into its being through solitude43

.

It is clear what ‘care’ stands for in the philosophy of Heidegger. When Dasein loses sight of

its aim towards an end, as a being-ahead-of-itself and merely lives as just a being-always-along-side,

because of the urge to live the encounter with the self, which brings it to its own-most possibility, the care

brings it back to the line of authenticity lest the care fails bond. In brief, talking about care entails a

reference to a basic existential ontological phenomenon, which faces man towards its end in nothingness

and which gives an identity to the being of Dasein.

Death from the above is clearly brought by Martin Heidegger as that which is particular to each

individual and in which an individual’s being which lies in possibility is actualized. The human life

makes some sense because of death which renders the life of man whether authentic or inauthentic

depending on one’s choice. However, man’s transcendence and aspiration and constant projection ends in

‘Nothingness’. This summarizes the whole of Heidegger’s work on the life of Dasein and its end which

best describes the existential and the ontico-ontological explanation of Dasein as a temporal being.

No doubt, the philosophy of Martin Heidegger on the ontological deconstruction and the place of

death therein is an issue very pertinent for existential and ontological discourse. However, we shall put

across certain issues here of which would explain how this Heidegger’s thesis was received by many

thinkers since his philosophy centered much on a very topical area of discourse in existentialism and

philosophy.

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In the first place, one may not be surprised why Heidegger took the slant he took in his argument

about death since his romance with the work of Nietzsche and other German nihilists had a massive

imprint on his understanding of life as being very personal and subjective just as the concept of death.

Heidegger accepts evidently that the very major aspect of the human life which man seems to repress is

death. However, Heidegger surprisingly down played the fact of its ‘return’. The spice of the human life

lies in the futuristic thought of man. Man daily checks his past life and is happy with himself for the

present achievement. He looks towards the future aspiring towards- not death- but what he would achieve

or celebrate about. Placing death as the ultimate future which a man must look up to so as to be

authentically in existence may make the Heidegger’s discourse on authenticity suspicious. The result is

that the authenticity of Martin Heidegger may not in the strict sense be authentic enough.

Jean Paul Sartre’s reaction against what Heidegger calls authenticity in relation to death brings

out the aforementioned clearer. In the Being and Nothingness, Sartre espoused that against the

insinuations of Heidegger about death as that through which the being of Dasein is actualized that death

robs life of every meaning to man44

. Death contributes to the encounter which man gets in the world and

which contributes to the actions of man aimed at achieving the freedom he desires. Of course, Sartre’s

thesis is well understood. If man is born just to keep anticipating death and centering his whole life on it,

life is as good as nothing since all efforts of man which, no matter how illusory it appears, is brought to

nothingness. Man is born to live and not to die.

The account of authenticity of Martin Heidegger may not be well taken by the psychoanalysts. In

the psychoanalytical explanation of man in relation to death, it is clear that a man who in danger does not

strive for survival is mentally ill. Man from the Heideggerian discourse could hasten his actualization

which Heidegger made so glorious, by killing himself since the point of actualization is in death not in the

discovery of one’s life goals. However, the repression of death makes one more attuned to a vision about

one’s life’s goal.

Freud systematically pointed out that repression is the cornerstone of psychoanalysis. When

something makes one uncomfortable and one chooses to ignore or forget it, it enables the individual

concentrate on something more constructive. Heidegger may be fast to attack this point arguing that when

one chooses to ignore the presence of death, his life becomes such that nothing inspires him towards a

right life pattern. This may appear good enough but we cannot lose sight of the appearance of the

repressed thing in the subliminal consciousness which even without coming directly as fear makes one

fix a vision- a goal to achieve temporally.

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This argument resurfaces in the thought of William James. He points out that unconsciously, each

of us yearns to have a feel of special value, first in the universe and heroism is how we justify that need

because it qualifies us for a special destiny.45

James explains the recurrence of the ultimate desire of man

which comes not in the contemplation of death but in the psychological play of the stack reality in a mind

through unconscious acts. In his discourse, James brought up another issue which is very pertinent to this

discourse regarding Heidegger’s understanding of death. James asks us why we need a special destiny.

His answer again was straight and simple: because the alternative is literally too much to contemplate46

.

Heidegger played down much on the issue of a world after as a matter of fact does not find it of

much importance to deliberate on in his Being and Time. He presented the issue as a study best fitted for

the metaphysics of death instead of his ontology. He said:

Finally what might be discussed under the topic metaphysics of death lies outside the

domain of an existential analysis of death. Questions of how and when death came into

the world, what meaning it can have and is to have as an evil and affliction in the

aggregate of entities – these are questions which necessarily presuppose an

understanding not only of the character of being which belongs to death but of the

ontology of the aggregate of entities as a whole and especially of the ontological

clarification of evil and negativity in general.47

The implication of Heidegger’s not giving this Being-unto-death a source is clear. Heidegger

should have understood that the inquiry into being which he set out would be fruitless if it lacked origin.

The previous ontologies which Heidegger feels were misled by the lack of fundamental ontology appear,

in the final analysis, to have a more systematic ground than what Heidegger presented. Heidegger, by the

above tried to solve a supposed problem and ended up in the same thing, if not worse. Being must have an

origin. Heidegger ignored this but tried to explain away the problem of origin with thrownness. This

throwness is still open ended since if Dasein is thrown it must be by an efficient cause. He carefully

avoided speaking about an origin so that he could avoid the risk of discoursing this ‘metaphysics of death’

which would have made left many things anticipated in his discourse of authentic and inauthentic

existence.

One observes that many people look beyond the incidence of death. If death, as Heidegger is

wont to preach, is the ultimate end of Dasein, Dasein would not have seen any need to act as moral beings

since ‘after all every thing about life is meaningless as it ends in nothingness’. Men generally believe that

after death there is another existence even a better one. This generates the issue of what exactly the ‘self’

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is, an important question which Heidegger did not delve into addressing the issue of death in relation to

the self, which connotes whether there is life after death or not he said:

If death is defined as the end of Dasein…it does not simply imply an ontical

decision whether after death still being is possible, either higher or lower, or

whether Dasein lives on or even outlasts it-self and is immortal48

.

Heidegger accepts is disinterestedness in the issue of life after death but fails to understand that

the meaningfulness of life and death lies in what happens after death and not death itself. The issue of the

immortality of the soul, despite its celebrated, controversy remains the point of success in the discourse

about life and death. So long as man is a being given to a regimented life of time and space, and governed

by the realities of forces he knows not, the general instinct is to reason a being whose necessary beingness

exceeds the spatio-tempora categorization and who controls the universe. Plato called it ‘the one’ and

Aristotle called it the Prime Cause.

The existence of this being that possesses superlative qualities gives meaning to the limitations of

man and gives meaning to man’s existence and origin in the first place. Heidegger made the origin of

Dasein so precarious and gregarious. Dasein, all of a sudden, found itself in the world which was ordered

by ‘nothing’ and from then began striving to make out some meanings out of the world of ‘nothing’. So

disorganized man entered the universe and so disorganized man leaves it by ending his whole existence in

nothingness. Evidently, Heidegger’s argument here despite its solidity require more elucidation since an

existential analysis of man must cut across what a man hopes for a question which Kant accommodated in

his explanation of what philosophy is (cf. Critique of pure reason.)

Sartre’s reaction towards Heidegger’s dismissal of God is will taken. In the Existentialism and

Humanism Sartre distinguishes non theistic existentialistic where he numbered both himself and

Heidegger from theistic existentialistic like Gabriel Marcel. He saw the need to point out Heidegger’s

explanation of man as a being without source citing the Heidegger’s concept of abandonment. For Sartre,

when we speak of abandonment-a favorite word of Heidegger- we only mean to say that ‘God does not

exist’.49

He aptly explained that the existentialist is strongly opposed to, what Sartre calls secular

morality which dismisses the need for God entirely. On the contrary, if we must have morality, a society

and a law abiding world, it is essential that certain values should be taken seriously; they must have an a

priori existence ascribed to them50

. The abrupt beginning which Heidegger gave to Dasein necessitates a

blurred end- authenticity.

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The issue of anxiety, however, does not raise much problem since Heidegger represents, in the

Being and Time, the real situation of anxiety and the effect it has on Dasein. Anxiety, according to him

(Heidegger), inspires some worth ‘quietism’, which seems to make man inactive and even sad. Anxiety

for Heidegger brings Dasein before itself. Anxiety takes away from Dasein the possibility of

understanding itself, it throws Dasein back to that which it is anxious about. To say in brief, Heidegger

sees anxiety as that which manifests in Dasein its being towards its own most-potentiality-for-being. But

the other aspect of anxiety as that which inspires freedom in Dasein, to authenticity of its being raised

some problems.

The Nature of ‘Dasein’-man is such that anxiety faces man with the limitedness of his freedom.

In fact anxiety, as Heidegger discusses it, about death should live Dasein imagining the futility of his

existence and even dampens his spirit towards working hard. This is why everyone tends to repress this

fate. Becker Ernest slated, in line with this, that everything that man does in his symbolic world is an

attempt to deny and overcome his ‘grotesque fate’, because to see the world as it is, is devastating and

terrifying; it makes routine, authentic, leisure, and self-confident activities impossible.51

Man, in the state

of anxiety, in brief, feels a sense of despair. Anxiety about death does not encourage one towards one’s

freedom but instead it renders man’s activities seemingly retroactive. It is easy to conclude that

Heidegger’s argument no matter how fantastic it appears is unrealistic.

Heidegger seems to focus on death alone as the goal of temporality. This made him attempt at

explaining the phenomenology of death instead of starting from the onset to discourse what death is and

how it shapes existence. The gatelessness of the experience of death renders it practically impossible to

discuss the phenomenology of death. So, it is even bad argument for Heidegger to make an existential and

an ontological analysis of death at the same time. One can at most explain how death is accepted by a

people from the way the bereaved behave when they lose their loved ones. No one has died before to

come back to explain what it means to be dead. At least one may find it impossible to fix up to the metal

states of the dead to know how much death pays.

Heidegger’s view would have been better placed if he discourses what it means to live and from

there how a particular life-style necessitates a particular kind of death. Taking the work to that angle

would make his work ‘normative’ but more meaningful. Authenticity of life is but an empty concept

which Heidegger ambiguously presented to technically maneuver his ways away from being prescriptive.

Just and good life consists in a particular pattern of behavior an authentic way of life must also have some

prescribed life style whether as strong and inconsiderate as the superman of Nietzsche or as holy and

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meek as the people in the Augustine’s city of God. It suffices to say at this juncture that Heidegger

conceals a lot of ideas which he tries to project under the cover of strange usage of words and subjective

vocabularies.

Despite the above issues raised from the work of Heidegger’s ontological deconstruction and the

place of death, we must acknowledge immediately that his ideas opened a new way of understanding

death not as tragedy but as that which explains life better. The originality of his work is quite impressive.

He developed a fresh concept of freedom of action in which one determines what kind of life one wants to

live in such a temporal universe minding the importance individual life of conviction and self

assertiveness and not in the communal world of the ‘we’.

Death is the own-most-possibility of Dasein. It is personal to everyone. The life of one logically

should also be personal since death is a closed system. No one dies on behalf of the other. Meaningfulness

of life lies in standing out and continually projecting oneself over oneself as futuristic entities (beings).

One thus concludes that the issue of death as discussed by Martin Heidegger, despite some unrealistic

positions of his, remains a very wonderful masterpiece on the ontological understanding of death.

4.4 Heidegger and Existentialism.

The basic idea that runs through the works of he existentialist philosophers is the idea that

existence precedes essence. This idea shows itself clearly in the work of Heidegger where he attempted

going into the study of ‘Being’. In fact in the section 9 of Heidegger’s work, he made this clear in these

terms:

The essence [wesen] of this entity lies in its ‘to be’ [zu-sein]. Its Being- what- it-

is [was-sein] {essentia} must so far as we can speak of it at all, be conceived in

terms of its ‘Being’ {existential}…. The essence of Dasein lies in its

existence.52

The above quotation serves as a foundation for the philosophy of the existentialists. Martin

Heidegger’s effort to establish the above point seems to have stuck him to the error of beginning and

ending the human enquiry, comprising the psychological, anthropological and the ontological, on man as

a being in the world. This influence on Heidegger was no doubt a fruit of German nihilism championed in

the 19th century by Fredrick Nietzsche whose will to power summarized the nature of the world and life.

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Nietzsche in his work The Joyful Wisdom (directly) and other works (indirectly) projected

nihilism. The beginning of nihilism in Nietzsche came upon his emphasis on the power of the human

creativity. This recognition of human creativity by Nietzsche was heralded by his declaration- ‘God is

dead’. The destruction of the belief in God creates a fresh avenue for man’s creative energies to develop

fully. This is made possible by the freedom, encountered in the exit of the Christian God, a freedom

which sets the human mind en course to actualization. Nietzsche further pointed out that

The greatest event of recent times- that God is dead, that belief in the Christian God

has become unworthy of belief, already begins to cast its first shadows over Europe.

At last the horizon lies free before us even granted that it is not bright at least our

sea, lies open before us. Perhaps there has never so open a sea53

The commandments of the Christian God by the above no longer pose a problem to man whose

activities were limited by the belief in the unreal supernatural realm at the expense of the real natural

world, a situation which was seen in the works of he medieval thinkers.

Nietzsche’s argument was that God’s presence is inimical to human development. This idea was

expressed deeper in another work written by Nietzsche – The Twilight of the Idol. In this work, Nietzsche

insisted that the concept of God was up to now the greatest objection to concrete human existence.

Nietzsche’s indignation for Christianity and God is mainly from the supposed negative impact religion

has on man who is weakened, humbled, rendered tortured and unable to develop himself because of his

conscience. Christian values which are linked directly to God either prevent the growth of superior

individuals or weakens them. Nietzsche advanced an active nihilism which centred on a rejection of a

moral pattern which is obsolete.

One understands from Nietzsche’s stand, where Heidegger’s point of departure began.

Heidegger needed to prescribe to Dasein’s existence a life which is free in the real sense of it

towards an actualization of humanhood. This freedom is established by the mineness of Dasein

in which Dasein sees itself from in its freedom to choose an authentic or inauthentic life which

comprises of a life of the ‘crowd’. Thus the expression of freedom lies in the ability of Dasein to

be mine in its freedom and choice. This forms one fundamental principle that explains the human

causal activities.

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Nietzsche, before Heidegger saw this fundamental principle in the ‘will to power’,

through which we can unify the human vital phenomena. This consists in self- preservation

which is but one direct and most common consequence of existence. Nietzsche may have

stretched his thesis on freedom too far by the misgivings of his nihilism; hence his ideas express

mainly the external human survival in freedom and choice. Heidegger’s position may be said to

have been understood better by Sartre. In his Being and Nothingness, and Existentialism and

Humanism, Sartre seems to redirect he awkward areas of the ontology of Martin Heidegger.

Sartre understands Heidegger’s concept of Dasein as a being in the world and a being

which exists with the other entities that are ready- to- hand. He re-introduces the two entities

differently by the use of the pour soi and the en soi. The pour soi becomes for Sartre what

Dasein meant for Heidegger, while the en soi was definitively the beings ready- to- hand.

However, he seems to go beyond Heidegger to a more radical explanation of what the question

of being consists in. Sartre, however, goes to the extreme in his position on Heidegger.

Heidegger’s raising the question of being in the first place was a meaningless question since the

en soi is undefinable; it exceeds the realm of meaning.

The en soi for Sartre is but a component in the synthesis of man as a being – in – the-

world. Therefore, all that can be known about it is the through the ontological analysis of the

man. But Sartre did not assume the ontological analysis of man as precedent to the general

ontology nor is it a special branch of general ontology. Instead he concluded against Heidegger’s

position, that the ontology of man is a general ontology.

Karl Jaspers equally understood the sense of being in the usage Heidegger put it. Jaspers,

however, seems to deviate a little from the Sartre and Heidegger’s understanding by introducing

a third kind of being. For Jaspers, we have three kinds of beings namely: the An sich sein- the

beingness of thing proper (as it is, not as it appears to us), the Gegenstand- sein – being as

subject to us and as present- at- hand (using Heidegger’s words) and the last fur- sich sein

otherwise the ich-sein. This last one is only found in man as the being- for- itself endowed with

consciousness and freedom.

In the explanation of the pour soi, Sartre brought up the issue of freedom in a special

way. He opined that by his nature, man is condemned to be free. This freedom apparently lies in

man’s ability to choose. Choice, here, is not, of course, an easy thing sto make. This idea of

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choice and the difficulty therein accounted for Sartre’s use of anguish, forlornness, and despair

the various situations one finds oneself in the face of living an authentic lifestyle. This issue

reflected in the Existentialism and Humanism. In his explanation of anguish, Sartre stated that

The existentialists say at once that man is anguish. What this means is this : the

man who involves himself and who realizes that he is not only the person he

chooses to be, but also a lawmaker who is at the same time choosing all

mankind as well as himself cannot help escape the feeling of his total and deep

responsibility.54

From the above, Sartre explained anguish as the deep sense of responsibility in which one

has to determine himself and his life along side the others. In anguish, one does what appears to

be a Kantian categorical imperative where Kant wants each actor to weigh his actions to know

how good it will look as a universal law. Sartre established that anguish expresses itself even

when it is repressed.

Anguish faces man with the responsibility of taking resolute decision about the choices to

make. The difficulty herein is expressed especially when the individual has two options which

would have a resolute double effect of both good and bad. For instance, a man who finds himself

in a situation to kill his father for who he loved to avoid exposing a crime which the man

committed and which his father has resolved to reveal. The man has the option either to kill this

father to stay good with his image or allow the father and die disgracefully.

One wonders if this anguish reflected in responsibility of choice would not lead to some

quietism. Quietism cursorily seems to debar one from action, but in actual fact, Sartre believes

that it actually pushes one into action. Every person who is inclined to position of responsibility

knows this anguish since it comes up at every point of decisive decision making.

Kierkegaard in the Fear and Trembling explained this issue of anguish which he called

the anguish of Abraham. Abraham was not sure if it was actually God who asked him to

slaughter his son or a voice from hell.55

But he was caught up with the decision making a choice

between his son and God’s friendship. Sartre made reference to this while acknowledging the

effect of anguish and its day to day occurrence in life. This implies our facing many possibilities

and direct responsibility to other men who are affected by any decision taken.

Anguish is so tied to forlornness which is our choice of being. Forlornness in Sartre’s

work has a great implication which stands against Heidegger’s work. We shall evaluate this later

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from the understanding of despair which underlies it. Sartre explained despair as our ability to

reckon only with that which is our will56

. When we are faced with many possibilities, we see

ourselves left in that realm. But these possibilities are to be reckoned with only to he measure to

which he human action comports itself towards them. Once one’s actions are adapted to those

possibilities he is faced with, one stands to make his decision alone since not even God can adapt

one’s action to him.

Sartre by the above explained that it is absurd for one to go with the opinion ‘let others

complete what I cannot complete’. One may initiate a wonderful idea but by his very attitude of

pushing over things to others, his task will be left unfinished and a new person coming up with a

new idea instead of taken over from where the other stopped begins a fresh project to achieve.

Therefore, quietism which is supposed to make one withdraw from an action should be that

which should stimulate action by the single act of despair.

Sartre’s raising of the problem of forlornness attacked the implicit denial of God’s

existence in the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. Sartre was of the opinion that existentialism

does not entail a denial of God’s existence. He rather opined that the tenets of existentialism are

opposed to the secular morality which denies the existence of God.

Sartre as it were is not actually supporting the existence of God. His concept was that

morality is possible because of the psychological impact of God’s existence. Sartre suggested

that if the existence of God is denied then everybody can do anything and go away; thus, anarchy

would suffuse the world. His idea was carried on by Wang Lui. Lui explained that the life of the

human race is built around the existence of a common apple so that the moral judgment in the

world today stemmed from the after effect of the apple scene namely: the fable of a man

spending forty days on the mountain only to return with a tablet of stone. ‘We are forced to

abide’, Lui imagined, ‘by the dictates of such tablet for the sake order’57

and hence avoid Hobbes

and his state of nature which is capable of ending human race.

Lui and Sartre, like Heidegger, do not seem to believe God, or in Him or anything that

may be said of him. The existence of God for them is utilitarian. So long as the existence of God

can yield some use of making people find any single meaning in keeping the rules. God is

incapable of intervening in human affairs or world activities since man can take up the world that

belongs to him. One may not be surprised to see why Sartre took his stance on existence and

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action for him there is no reality except in action and man is nothing else but his plan; he exists

only to the extent that he fulfils himself; he is therefore nothing else than ensemble of his acts,

nothing else than his life.58

This has a very horrible impact on religion as we shall explain later in

the next chapter of this work.

The secondary reflection of Gabriel Marcel, who Sartre himself called a theistic

philosopher, would register a different view from what Heidegger and other existentialists

posited. Marcel does not see any reason for the individualism which Kierkegaard started and

eventually Heidegger adopted it more precisely. Man should be considered in terms of his

position as a being in the society. When this view of man is held, then man goes deep into

association not just with science as in the primary reflection but in a certain truth which cannot

be scientifically investigated but which illumines people’s life. He saw this truth in mystery

revealed by God himself.

The denial of God by Heidegger as his existential background implied seems to expose

the shallowness of Heidegger’s philosophy. He removed God by his preference of existence over

essence without any convincing reason. At length the world became an order of the human mind,

the shape of human ingenuity and a product of the human reason. Does Heidegger believe that

nothing is in the world without first being in the mind? This is an epistemological problem which

can be implied from Heidegger’s ontology. Another question which Heidegger may need to

attend to is the issue of timeness and the world (not man this time around).

In the section 20 of his Being and Time, Heidegger’s elaboration of the Cartesian work

led him to the brief explanation of God as the ens creaturis. Heidegger differentiated this

creating being from the created things- creatio seminales. But my contention is this if at all

Heidegger believed that there is a creator, God and there are men then there are two conclusions:

either the world exists in time or it is eternal. If both are the case man must have come within the

timeness of the world or within time in the world’s eternity. Heidegger’s historicity and the

impacts on historicality and historiology appear clumsy. Heidegger may yet need to tidy his

inclinations from his method driven from apparent solipsism of Husserl to the ideas of

individualism which he borrowed from Kierkegaard and further to his nihilism thanks to his

German predecessors especially Nietzsche.

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Endnotes

1. Brian Elliott, Phenomenology and Imagination in Husserl and Heidegger (London: Routledge, 2005),

183.

2. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason trans Kemp Smith (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press ltd. 1967),

36

3. Fredrick Copleston, A History of Philosophy vol. vi. (New York: Double Day books 1994), 293

4. Brian Elliott, Phenomenology and Imagination in Husserl and Heidegger , 186.

5. Bernet Rudolf, Introduction to Husserlian Phenomenology (Evanston: Northwestern University Press

1993), 45

6. Brian Elliott, Phenomenology and Imagination in Husserl and Heidegger, 181.

7. Nicholas Royle, Deconstructions: A User's Guide (Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), 28

8. Joseph Kockelmans, Heidegger’s Being and Time The Analytic of Dasein as Fundamental Ontology

(USA: University press of America 1989), 66.

9. Martin Heidegger Being and Time transl. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper

and Row Pub. 962), 42

10. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time ,44

11. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, 46

12. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time ,43

13. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time , 42

14. Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena Trans. D.B. Allison (Evanston: Northwestern UP. 1973), 5

15. Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, 6

16. John Sallis (ed.), Deconstruction and Philosophy (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press,

1987), 3

17. Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena ,5

18. Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena ,5

19. Robert Sokolowski, Introduction to Phenomenology (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999)

2.

20. Karl Hedwig, Husserl and the Origin of phenomenology (London: Halle, 1978), 115.

21. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, 198.

22. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time ,53.

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23. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Nature vol. 13 trans. Blamey Kathelen and David Pellaner (Chicago: Chicago

University Press 1988), 62-63

24. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time , 51

25. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time , 31

26. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time , 67

27. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time , 60.

28. Georg-Hans Gadamer, Martin Heidegger’s One Path trans. Christopher Smith in Theodore Kissiel

and John Dan Buren Reading Heidegger from the start Essay in his earlier thought (Albany: Sunny

Press 1994), 34.

29. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time , 120.

30. Ernest Tughendart, Heidegger’s idea of Truth in Hermeneutics and Truth P. 87

31. Ernest Becker Denial of Death (New York: free Press 1973), 1

32. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, 99.

33. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, 290.

34. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, 290.

35. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, 291.

36. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, 291.

37. Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics transl. by Ralph Manteim (New York: Anchor books

1961), 46.

38. H. Symberberg, Heidegger and the Problem of Death (Stamford: Stamford University press 1971), 39

39. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, 98

40. Martin Heidegger, 66.

41. Dreyfus Hubert, Being- in- the- world: A commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time Div. I

(Cambridge: MIT Press 1991), 83

42. Gelven, A commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time (New York: Harper and Row Pub. 1970), 14

43. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, 236

44. Jean Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness transl. Hazel Barnes (London: Methuen publ. 1969), 198.

45. William James, 28

46. William James, 24

47. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time,292

48. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time,292

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49. Jean Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism transl. Hazel Barnes (London: Methuen publ. 1968),

38.

50. Jean Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism, 22.

51. Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death, (New York. Free Press 1973), 10

52. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time,67

53. F. Nietzsche, The Joyful Wisdom, 47

54. Jean Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism transl. Hazel Barnes (London: Methuen publ. 1968),

20.

55. Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling transl. R. Payne (London: Routeledge 1956), 109

56. Jean Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism, 31

57. .Wang Lui, The Nature of Existence (New York: Pocket books 1994), 83

58. Jean Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism, 32.

CHAPTER FIVE

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SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION

5.1 Summary

The focus of Heidegger’s Being and Time was on Ontological deconstruction. He attempted answering

the question of Being which according to him is long forgotten by the preceding ontologies. This focus

which Heidegger had assigned him a great function of regaining a new foundation for ontology. Brian

Elliot expresses the relevance of this foundation thus:

The ontology which Heidegger brought forward in the Being and Time became a

foundation which would guide the subsequent ontologies which even though may never

be but still left in philosophy a very critical inquiry into what Being is in the first place.

It is on this question of Being which Heidegger raised that subsequent philosophical

thought especially existentialism and other profound theories of metaphysics are based.1

\

Heidegger believed that a more critical and authentic analysis of Being would look into that on

the basis of which beings are already understood or that which underlies all particular entities and allows

them to show up as entities in the first place2. However, it is evident, according to Heidegger that many

philosophers and scientists alike tend to have overlooked the more basic pre-theoretical ways of being

from which their theories derive. And because they have equally applied those theories universally in an

incorrect manner, they have confused our understanding of Being and human existence. Heidegger, in a

bid to avoid these misconceptions, which his predecessors have been found to be guilty of, accepted that

his philosophical inquiry must be conducted in a new way, through a process of retracing the steps of the

philosophical history.

This misconception, which Heidegger laments about, impresses itself at every epoch in the

history of western philosophy which started from Plato (formally); and it is manifested in the terms

through which being is articulated in the history of philosophy dealing with the following: the proof of

God’s existence, logic, knowledge, reality and so on. Heidegger’s work was largely influenced by his

background. Thus, his studies in philosophy, theology and humanities added to the development of

hermeneutics, deconstruction, and post- modernism and so on.

The major source of Heidegger’s inspiration to inquire into Being is the Franz-Brentano’s work

on the treatise on Aristotle’s Manifold Uses of Being. His ‘Being and Time’ brought forth his ontological

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deconstruction, a critique of which this thesis attempts to achieve. Heidegger’s question of being is based

summarily on a historical argument, which became more pronounced in his later works.

To start off the inquiry into the deconstruction of being, Heidegger sought for a reasonable

method with which to operate. This choice of methodology, led Heidegger to the floor of Edmund Husserl

– the master of phenomenology. The choice of phenomenology and the influence of Edmund Husserl on

Heidegger were variously explained by many philosophers like Hannah Arendt, Hans Gadamer, and

Robert Dostal etc. Explaining this influence, Robert Dostal states:

Heidegger himself who is supposed to have broken with Husserl, based his hermeneutics

on an account of time that not only parallels Husserl’s account in many ways but seems

to have been arrived at through the same phenomenological method as was used by

Husserl. . . The difference between Heidegger and Husserl is significant, but if we do not

see how much it is the case that Husserlian phenomenology provides the framework for

Heidegger’s approach, we will not be able to appreciate the exact nature of Heidegger’s

project in the Being and Time or why he (Heidegger) left it unfinished3.

Dostal’s observation is quite clear as he noted that it was through the Husserlian principles of

phenomenology that Heidegger saw a gate way to this phenomenological deconstruction in the Being and

Time. Heidegger, nevertheless, seems to claim a total detachment to his veteran predecessor Edmund

Husserl, an assertion which Dahlstrom saw as an unfair representation of Husserl’s own work. He states

thus

… [That] Heidegger’s silence about the stark similarities between his account of

temporality and Husserl’s investigation of internal time-consciousness contributes to a

misrepresentation of Husserl’s account of intentionality4.

Despite the above, Heidegger’s choice of the phenomenological method aided his analysis of

being- Dasein as man whom he (Heidegger) explained along the line of temporality and nothingness.

Husserl accepts that all that philosophy is, is a description of experiences of things in themselves. This

may not be very palatable for Heidegger, who emphasizes the fact that philosophy entails an

understanding that experience is always already situated in a world and in the manner in which beings are

disclosed. We can thus surmise that the Husserlian intentionality has been transformed by Martin

Heidegger’s philosophy as the thought that all manner of experience is grounded in care.

This ground of care forms the very existential analysis which Heidegger sought to develop in his

Being and Time. Thus we cannot, Heidegger explains, successfully describe experience properly if we do

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not primarily find the being for whom such a description matter. This submission of Heidegger’s brings

him to his explanation of experience in respect to Dasein which is the being for whom ‘Being’ is an issue.

Heidegger criticized the traditional way of explaining human existence as very abstract and

metaphysical. He sought an existential answer to the issue of being. However, despite the existential

character of his work, which seems to have an anthropological nature, Heidegger made it clear that

Dasein is not intended to serve as a method of conducting a philosophical anthropology. The above idea

according to Derrida portrays that even though a deeper look at the Heideggerian teachings of Dasein

may not mean man ‘qua tale’ his discourse (Heidegger) still shows Dasein as man.

Heidegger’s attempt to answer the question of being of each of us was done in order for him to

open the more general question, which inadvertently meant an adoption of phenomenology as a method.

This methodology in the final analysis makes him arrive at the very conclusion that Dasein is care.

Dasein in the thrownness, Heidegger continues, finds himself in the world amidst other beings. In this

state, Dasein is thrown into its very possibilities, which includes its own most possibility actualized in

death. Heidegger, having come this far, attempts to explain the need for Dasein to live out these

possibilities. The need for responsibility and even freedom to choose to be responsible introduced

Heidegger to his very explanation of authentic and inauthentic existence, which became the very crux of

his discuss on Dasein.

Heidegger sees Dasein as different from the other beings. The difference here is that whereas

things are merely determinate and have distinct properties in their kind of being, Dasein stands out as that

which makes or creates from these other ordinary beings. He explained that the kind of being which

Dasein manifests is not that of a thing with properties, instead a range of possible ways of being. The

‘Beingness’ of Dasein as seen above is defined by the capability of projection by Dasein. Dasein projects

itself beyond itself into the very possibilities which it has chosen or which allows itself to choose. The

Dasein’s existence remains an issue for it as Dasein’s actions are left for it to always decide. The very

existence of Dasein means a steady projection towards the future. It is a constant movement of being of

Dasein towards what it ought to be and what it will be.

The essence of Dasein’s existence has its footing on time. Dasein is thrown into an already

existing world and thus into its mortal possibilities. Thus existence is basically temporal and this is

because we have a past that is experienced in guilt and a future which is anticipated. Time, nevertheless,

is conceived here as that which stretches towards an indefinite future merely limited by death. Thus,

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[D]eath is a possibility-of-Being which Dasein itself has to take over in every

case. With death, Dasein stands before itself in its own-most-potentiality-for-

Being. This is possibility in which the issue is nothing less than Dasein’s Being-

in-world. Its death is the possibility of no-longer being able to be there5.

The above quotation clearly spells out the fact that the ‘Beingness’ of Dasein is essentially a

finite one; it is an ordered advancement towards ceasing to be, death. Evidently, the awareness of

mortality is an essential part of Dasein. This new question raised by Heidegger, by this fact, explains

better the variation in human existence. This variation made manifest in the Heidegger’s explanation of

the authentic and inauthentic existence. Heidegger explained further that some people engage with the

world fully aware of their mortal lives. This awareness, no doubt, necessitates the lives of such people; a

life, which appears more authentic and always in keeping with their ontological nature. This authentic

life-style is differentiated from the inauthentic existence in which an individual leads a superficial life-

style reflected in fear and living in conformity with the trend of the popular group- the ‘they’ self.

The ‘thrownness’ of Dasein (of which it lacks choice) brings it to the things that are in the world.

As such, by subsequent abstraction, Dasein gets to develop some theoretical concepts and regard things

with essential and accidental properties as objects of theoretical knowledge. This aspect of it makes it

possible for one to think erroneously of one’s existence as if one exists merely like other objects in the

world. However, the nature and the existential ontological character of other being (being-at-hand) is

explainable from the explanation of the being of Dasein. This, as it were, makes for a clearer distinction

between Dasein as Being – there and the other beings – Being- ready- at -hand. Whereas Dasein lives out

its possibilities, the other beings are there as tools to Dasein who Heidegger explained is primarily the

homo faciendum before the home sapiens.

This explanation plausibly carried into existentialism an attempt to explain man, his nature and

place in the world against other beings that he exists alongside with it whether animate or inanimate. Jean

Paul Sartre a strong analyst of Martin Heidegger in his work Being and Nothingness made the same

distinction following Martin Heidegger. He saw in the account of Heidegger a veritable explanation of

what ontology should consist of especially as it pertains to man and his relationship with the other beings

in the universe. Sartre introduced his discourse with the distinction between the Pour-soi (Being for itself)

the man who has freedom as ontological in him. To say the least, Sartre saw man as being condemned to

be free. On the other hand, the en-soi was seen by Sartre as meaning the same thing with Heidegger’s

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ready-to-hand. They are things in themselves always at the disposal of the (Pour-soi) being-for-itself. The

Pour-soi, therefore, becomes for Sartre a being which controls it environment.

The Pour-soi (Being for itself), like Dasein of Martin Heidegger, make effort to achieve

authenticity. However, while Heidegger’s Dasein strives for its actualization in death which is its own-

most-possibility, the Pour-soi achieves its freedom as an authentic being, a freedom which not even death

can forestall. Unlike Heidegger who believes that death is what actually gives meaning to the existence of

Dasein, Sartre insisted that death removes every meaning to life. James Christian cited him thus:

Death is never that which gives life its meaning, it is, on the contrary, that which

in principle removes all meanings from life6.

The issue of freedom, which Sartre posits, seems to bring out what appears to be hidden in the

work of Heidegger for which many criticized him as using obscure language, weak arguments and

dubious etymologies to hide the deep flaws there in his philosophy. In his defense of freedom, Sartre

projected that the quest for an authentic life stems from man’s freedom. According to him, human beings’

encounter with obstacle which are not man-made and which he fights to conquer everyday leads him to

authentic existence. In his words:

[H]uman reality everywhere encounters resistance and obstacles which it has not

created but these resistances and obstacles have meaning only in and through the

free choice which the human reality is7.

Heidegger would have been more clearly understood had he raised up indecisively the issue of

freedom and human choice, which thereof can be vitiated by death. However, he skipped the issue of

freedom therefore endangering the Dasein as an entity which merely walks into ‘nothingness’; a

submission which renders the whole aspect of the human endeavour in its entirety meaningless. Sartre’s

explanation of the pour-soi which agrees systematically with that of Heidegger could be said to have

stemmed from his explanation in his book Existentialism and Humanism where he stated that existence

precedes essence and if it is so, then man is responsible for what he is.

Man must therefore know himself and further assume responsibility for his existence. The above

x-rays what Heidegger understood by authentic existence. For him, Dasein must strive towards a

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responsibility of itself as it has been thrown in to the world in fallenness. Nevertheless, Heidegger may

not readily concur with Sartre further on the issue of responsibility. Sartre believes that the whole world

of men is the same. And as such the responsibility of man’s existence not only ends with him but equally

extends to the other man. Heidegger on his own account would be more willing to accept the

independence of everyone in the race of self actualization. With regard to this, he maintained that a life of

extrovertedness (loosely used) towards the crowd is a swerve towards inauthenticity. An attempt to prove

man’s responsibility for his existence, further led Sartre to re-explain Heidegger’s concept of

abandonment. He said that abandonment, an expression dear to Heidegger only means that God does not

exist, end. For him man is abandoned, because neither in himself nor beyond himself does he find any

possibility of clinging to something. Heidegger implicitly bought this idea and hence spent his whole time

in the analysis of the human person as beginning from the world of phenomena and ending in the world of

phenomena.

Dasein’s existence, we could gather from the work of Heidegger, has a spontaneous beginning.

This beginning, of course, is traced back to nothing not even evolution. Heidegger is, however, willing to

describe the origin of man from the point of view of ‘thrownness’ in which man just finds himself in the

world in utter confusion. In this confused state, man strives to make some meaning out of the world by

striving to leave an authentic life, which consists in continually transcending himself towards nothing in

particular. The above, no doubt, makes the human existence precarious. Man’s life in the world as Being-

in-the-world, following the Being and Time has no yardstick for measuring its morality. Any action

sequel to the above goes in as morally correct in as much as the individual is convinced of what he wants

to do. Little wonder then Sartre explained further in his Existentialism and Humanism that every action

by man is good. Thus, he emphasized that to be this or that is to affirm at the same time the value to what

we choose since we can never choose evil. This explanation evidently is faulty because not only that the

sense of evil stems from man’s innermost cravings to dominate and subdue others but equally that man

has the nature of both good and evil. Chris Hedges explained this better in the Man and the Society

stating that the very nature of man is such that he continually seeks to satisfy his personal desires

irrespective of the right of the others but is checked always by the dictates of morality and law.

Man’s end following Heidegger’s treatise renders man’s whole life meaningless since the whole

effort of man comes to nothingness – death. At death, everything about man is destroyed. Dasein is

brought to the state of no-longer-being. In this state, man’s existence, achievements, efforts and sufferings

ends meaninglessly. One may be quick to ask Heidegger what the reward of authentic life is according to

his teachings. One who heartily chooses the Epicurean utilitarian principle to the extreme may likely

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laugh at the seeming visionless nature of Heidegger’s explanation of man’s life in the world as his

teachings seem to make life a whole lot of nothingness. Russell who seems to be extreme in his ideas of

death and man in the world appear to have a more convincing answer to the human destiny than

Heidegger, Russell spoke saying “when I die my body will rot and nothing else will be heard of me”.

From the above, it suffices to say that the whole of Heidegger’s explanation of Dasein as a being-for-

itself is faulty and is not easily acceptable.

On another note, explaining Dasein in relation to other beings, Heidegger emphasizes that those

other beings owe their explanation to Dasein and as such they are not conscious. This plausible

distinction by Martin Heidegger was equally made by Immanuel Kant, Husserl and Kierkegaard before

him. This distinction represents a characterization of the distinction between consciousness, which depicts

freedom and which is not bound even by the principle of causality and other objects subject to causal laws

or mechanical influences outside of them. This influenced the thought of subsequent philosophers whose

philosophy held sway in the contemporary period like Merleau Ponty, who distinguished the ‘en soi’ that

stands as a ‘general label’ for nature from the Pour-soi which represented for him the nature or the label

for humanity.

Dasein is a contingent matter which possesses the fullness of reality. Nevertheless, a being which

is for something is lacking in that respect and as such possesses within itself an element of nothingness,

which as a matter of fact is subjectively experiences with a sense of anguish or nausea (that is what it is

not). We could say then that there is a resolution of beingness in the medieval concept of the ‘in se’ and

‘in alio’ (the substances existing in themselves as in contra distinction from the accident which inheres in

others).

Martin Heidegger strongly believes that by standing Dasein out as that which has its existence

prior to essence and being a ‘being’ through whom other beings are understood he has attempted to

answer the question of being whose failure has led to a great short coming in the metaphysics of the

preceding metaphysicians. Heidegger hoped to overcome the tradition of the western metaphysic that

began from Plato. He points out a major flaw in their metaphysics which he identified as a forgetfulness

of being. He emphasized that the forgetfulness of being entails actually forgetting a very essential fact,

which is ‘that our understanding of being is based on the way we are in the world and relate with/to the

entities therein. However, we must understand equally that this defect identified in the traditional

metaphysics leads, in every standard, to a misdirected quest for a definitive theory of everything. This is

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geared towards understanding the raison d’etre of the way things really are; an inquiry into Heidegger’s

phenomenological method – disclosure.

The question still stands out as to whether Martin Heidegger actually succeeded in what he set out

to do. As I explained in the preceding paragraph, the question of the forgetfulness of being was to

Heidegger what the Cartesian ‘deus ex macchina’ is for Gilbert Ryle. Heidegger attempted to raise the

question of Being once again, a question which he believes is far dead and forgotten. He never denied the

Kantian effort in the modern period to fight to land the question of being which has long ago been

forgotten and which even Descartes finally laid to rest by his methods (Cf. Kant and the problem of

metaphysics trans. by Richard Taff). Heidegger’s thesis is a very genuine one. He started well on the

general understanding of ‘being’, a field where he so desired to rescue but eventually crash landed by

leaving the Being and Time incomplete. We agree that man does not exhaust the entirety of beingness.

But Heidegger’s Being and Time seem to be contented handling only the existential structure of man

while suspending the structure and the ontological grounds of other beings. He primarily understood

Dasein as the totality of what beingness should be but in the course of his work, he customized it to man

who for him answers the question of being qua being.

This aspect of the Heidegger’s work seem to make a mess of his whole task leading him back to

existential anthropology which he claimed he was apt to avoid in the beginning of his Being and Time.

Primarily, Heidegger made the study of human existence superior to the quest for the meaning of ‘Being’,

which he understood as the very basic principle which underlies reality thus his question in the

Introduction to Metaphysics; why is there something instead of nothing at all? His attempt to answer this

question in Being and Time has bearing to what it means for man to be. This further leads to a more

fundamental question of what it means to ask the question of being. These questions raised about being,

lie behind the obviousness of everyday life and further behind the empirical questions of natural sciences.

There is yet another gap in Heidegger’s philosophical methodology – disclosure. Heidegger’s

postulation that things disclose themselves to man, does not make for proper object-subject distinction

which gives the knower the faculty of immediate apprehension of realities but instead is left with

conceptualizations as one could see in the sciences.

Despite the above, we could spare Heidegger a chance. It could be that he wanted to see the

whole world of being from the Lens of ‘the man’. After all, Luij Pen insists that the world is radically

human, that the idea of a world-without-man is as meaningless as that of man without a world8.

Heidegger also consents to this view stating that the world is a realization of Dasein’s possibilities. We

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give it to him at length but modern day radical Cosmologists may seriously be suspicious of his ideas.

One cannot picture the whole universe through the lens of man. Man is on its own such a being with

varied ideologies such that different human beings picture the world variously. It is thus reductionist to go

by the Heidegger’s concept.

Heidegger’s concept of man includes language which a veritable tool for a being to exist. In fact

the value which Heidegger saw in language made him demonstrate beings in terms of language stressing

that in language beingness is encountered. Heidegger will agree that Language depends on the history of

the human person and contributes to the identification of the being of man. But He seems to contradict his

belief by his use of language which seems to be very dubious since it makes little sense in German

language but seem to be obscure entirely in any form of translation. Even though the post-structuralists

like Ponty will use Heidegger’s case as a proof for coinage of language which, for them, makes reality.

Heidegger plays on words and covers his errors in linguistic fraud.

Quite notably, Heidegger tried to criticize the traditional Logic by stressing the limitations of

Logic, but Heidegger does not seem to be at home with the currents of modern logic which gives

philosophy to a rational understanding of the universe. Therefore, Heidegger found himself raising

questions about what existence is but how existence happens. The implication is simple. He raised

fundamental problems without giving any rational solution to the problems raised. Heidegger philosophy

is better treated as arts not core philosophy.

The understanding of philosophy is not only limited to the inner states such as anxiety,

thrownness, boredom, guilt etc but also it is equally understood by certain social and cultural conditions,

for instance, the science and technological advancements. The modern technological cult, which is

equally one of the ways in which Dasein relates with the world perceives things and handles them like

objects of consumption and objects which are under it to dominate without proper insight into its own

limitations. This, no doubt, expresses nihilism, the only philosophy left for metaphysical ambition to

grief. However, this mentality may have a more positive angle to it. More meaningfulness is in reality

than merely using the whole phenomenal world as a tool. The calculative thinking of modern science and

technology may not be easily be resisted but accordingly could be transcended through the inner

projection of the self away from the common life.

5.2 Heidegger: Religion and Ethics.

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The background to Heidegger’s philosophy which was mainly found in the German nihilism and

Heidegger’s association with Nazism influenced his ontological deconstruction and the relegation of

morals and religious values. In the first place, Heidegger saw in his work, a treatise which implicitly

served his political interest just like Nicolo Machiavelli in the middle ages who attempted to use the work

the Prince to achieve some political goals.

Martin Heidegger was a politician par excellence. His active participation in the government of

Hitler, which he promoted using his seat of Rector in his university and subsequent Nazi actions thereof

which were not very human, like his expulsion of Husserl just because he was a Jew raised many

questions about the morality of anything he ever produced. He never for one day denounced his

involvement with Nazis, thus his work implicitly demonstrates the ‘super power’ mentality associated

with Nazism ranging from his concept Dasein and the dependence of everything on it as they are useful to

him, to the negligence of God’s existence which naturally suspends secular morality.

The impact Nazism in the work of Martin Heidegger was such that it generated many arguments

in among the philosophers after him whether his work could be divorced from his political inclination and

whether it was necessary at all to study Heidegger in the first place. Victor Farias in his work Heidegger

et le Narzisme (Heidegger and Nazism), disparaged any form of deconstruction as being associated with

Heidegger’s philosophy which is clearly born out the constant association with Nazism. For Farias, the

work of Heidegger cannot be divorced from his political inclination which shows a neglect of the other

and stressed on the morality of self actualization founded on self-centredness.9 Bernard Steigler seems to

share the same view with Farias. Steigler sees the existential analysis of the Being and Time as an account

of psychic individuation10

. He thus perceived the problem of Martin Heidegger in his bid to put across his

thought as an inability to integrate his (Heidegger’s) to political inclination with his philosophy.

Steigler’s observation of the psychological individuation evident in Heidegger’s work is a result

of the Nietzsche’s superman. Heidegger understood the will to power as the culmination of the western

metaphysics. Nietzsche believed that the fullest expression of the Human vitality is the will to power.11

This will to power which is epitomized in the ubermensch- superman shows itself insistently on the

Heidegger’s character of Dasein of Heidegger.

Dasein comes in with its ontic possibility – a systematic method devised by Heidegger to make it

the creator of the ready- at- hand beings. With this it singles itself out with all its potentialities assuming

itself as a being to whom everything including time meaningfulness depends. Time which Immanuel Kant

projected as Being authentic and which Husserl exposes as independent becomes meaningless for

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Heidegger who thinks that time must be important only when used in relation to his superman- Dasein.

Dasein just like the Superman does not bend to any other superior agent but itself since it just emerged

and abided in the world. The result here is simple. The historical Dasein has no ontological history its

presence in the world is accidental. Secondly, Dasein has no morality whatsoever save that which it

defines for itself as to live individually and not collectively. By implication any kind of general morality

is tantamount to living a crowd life- it is inauthentic. Since general morality closes one up to personal

creativity to ensure that one lives a life unto death.

The whole teaching in ethics and religious philosophy aims at straightening out the human

intention and saving the human race from the hands of Hobbes state of nature. The human will and

limitless freedom pushes man into an inordinate quest for power and domination, a situation which is

checked by the dictates of morals. To check this, God’s presence was introduced. The introduction of God

in the human environment is not only for the sake of morality. It is equally a history based existence in

which the presence of the Aristotle’s unmoved mover and efficient cause accounts for the origin of the

existential world.

The very historical analysis of God in relation to world has many interpretations ranging from

mythological accounts (some are good to include the accounts from most of sacred scriptures under this)

to the scientific account. The bottom line of the whole account is that the world of the humans started

from somewhere and at some point. Placing God at the beginning of the universe still gives God the

charge of sustenance and ownership of the world. This brings forth the potency of natural law which is

valued by Aquinas in the middle ages.

The Heidegger’s de- emphasis of God’s existence creates a great problem which led him to

practically dodging the question of the true nature of the self which renders some of his ideas suspicious.

There is apparent collapse of values degeneration of psycho-religious impact even in the disposition

towards death which Heidegger boxed himself up into. The very life of Dasein so explained is

transcendent. By the understanding of transcendence, there is a movement beyond a normal level of

immediate existence to another. Heidegger ended his transcendence on the temporal transcendence which

is as good as being idealistic. The horizontal transcendence (word used by Batista Mondin), Dasein is

built to traverse the limits of time to achieve operational values for societal development. Thus

Heidegger’s temporal transcendence which became a temporal consciousness of death is of no value to

human development except through the continuous attempt to repress the inevitable. The Vertical as a

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matter of fact should be more personal since it is innate. This is transcendence in one’s innateness in

relation to God himself considering one’s life as a moral entity.

There was no way Heidegger could have discoursed Dasein in the process he did without any

concrete reference to the supernatural or morality. Heidegger seems to withdraw morality from the

existential pattern of human existence by his ontology. The ontological structure which Heidegger sought

to build by the above costly exclusion appeared to make his work an impromptu one and a disorganized

attempt to put the question of being in Place. Little wonder Husserl in the work Psychological and

Transcendental Phenomenology and the Confrontation with Heidegger by Steigler Benard expressed his

disappointment with Heidegger stating that

The content of Being and Time claimed to deal with ontology but only did so in the first

few pages of the book. Having nothing further to contribute to an ontology independent

of human existence Heidegger changed his topic to Dasein. By this he reduced

phenomenology to philosophical anthropology and offering an abstract and an incorrect

portrait of the human being.12

Evidently Heidegger’s work as Husserl commented shifted phenomenology to anthropology.

Despite the attempt made by Heidegger to escape from the grip of anthropology, he still fond himself

gripped strongly by anthropological dictates. This aspect of Heidegger’s work despite its negative

implication to religion in which there is total annihilation of the central theme of religion namely:

morality, existence of God and the glory of an after life, we must see in Heidegger an attempt to assert the

world as the world of creativity.

The human beings who leave every question to the answer of God, following Heidegger’s

philosophy are toeing a wrong track. Primarily a man is a being unto himself. In his beingenss and

freedom, man defines his life and attunes it to suit such an independence that makes answers to the

seeming mystical question of the universe. Heidegger’s lesson against the dogmatic and religiously

overbearing universe is well taken. He built the human race around their nature and thus gave reasons for

the scientific innovation encountered in the world.

Heidegger’s explanation of the being of man and his neglect of God raises a great suspicion.

Heidegger see to have been caught up with thee problem of explaining what the real nature of Dasein is.

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He rather made an unsystematic jump into the existential qualities of a being he has not explained his

nature. Let us briefly look at personal identity and how far Heidegger was able to ride across it.

5.3 Dasein and Personal Identity

The avoidance of the issue of personal identity by Martin Heidegger may not be a point of

surprise. The issue of personal identity which is tied to personhood has since generated a heated debate

among philosopher. Many philosophers are of the opinion that the self is a composite of body and soul a

composite which cannot be separated. Others believe that the self comprises of the body and the soul but

controlled by the soul since the body is just but a dormant participator in the human existence. For the

others yet, there is nothing like the self it exists nowhere but ideas and series of impressions.

Heidegger was evidently caught up by this web following his attempt to understand Kant who

tried to establish an existential world comprising of the palpable and non-palpable natures. Kant who was

perplexed by the previous polemics by the preceding rationalist and empiricist philosophers on the things

to be known declared the principle of a new metaphysics after the critique of the former. In his

submission, Kant explained the noumenal world and the phenomenal world both exist both are not

equally knowable. While the noumenal world is unknowable, the phenomenal world is knowable. The

implication of this Kantian position is that either he has performed a categorical error by falling victim to

the crime ha accused other of or that there are these worlds in actuality but he (Kant) is not witty enough

to break into its bounds.

The Kantian problem was well known to Heidegger who tried to interpret this epistemology of

Kant ontologically. Heidegger in his Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics analyzed Kantian position in

terms of man a knower who possesses a dual capacity of knowing the physical and non-physical13

. In his

interpretation, he allowed the dual reality knowable by Dasein but did not acknowledge the dual nature of

the Dasein as a being with physical and non physical ground. The existential characteristics of Dasein

should have been such to take from the ontological explanation of Dasein. Dasein is a being only in the

world but capable of transcendence. It possesses mood that plays out in the disposition towards death. All

these are activities that represent a particular mental state of an individual. Heidegger paid little or no

attention to the issues of the mind on which these attitudes step forth.

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Among the identity theorists, the situation of the c- states is identified in the B- processes. For

instance, when one is injured, one feels the pain but cannot touch it or see it instead one can actually

touch the injury but cannot touch the pain. The C- states a different state gives itself to the B- process as a

sate of actual affairs of the visible things. The behaviorists on their account believe that the state of the

mind is noticeable in the bodily reaction such that when one is in a state agony, the face, reaction and

gestures show the evidence of the mental disposition. These two theories singled out have their various

shortcomings (which we may not be very interested in because of the wok scope) but both attempt to

show that in the very nature of man and even in the existential analysis of the human being, there a

compulsory interplay between the mental and the physical nature of man.

Descartes’ attempt to understand the functionality of the mind in relation to the body generated a

great insight to the issues in the philosophy of mind. Descartes introduced the res- cogitans and the res-

extenza as the two values of human nature. The res cogitans brings out the nature of man as the real

nature man as a rational being to whom many tasks were given including the sense of feeling. It is in the

attribute of the mental substance to understand and perform other conscious acts. However, the res

extenza becomes but a substance which aids him attune to the world of science. The Cartesian ideas are

clearly spelt out. There is a double substance in the human nature: the mind and the body and these make

for the complete experience of the real world and the understanding of the inner consciousness of the

human person and the association of extrasensory ideas.

Heidegger’s neglect of this point makes his work on the existential structure of Dasein’s

existence incomplete and wrongly rooted. It is based on this idea that both the historical life of man, the

moral life of man and even the epistemological implications of Heidegger’s ontological analysis is found

problematic. Heidegger’s work by these points raised may be seen as not only incomplete much less

relevant. Heidegger’s aim was defeated. He failed to achieve what he set out to achieve instead he created

more problems by leaving open ended the questions he set to answer.

5.4 Conclusion

Heidegger’s thought no doubt was an immense one. He primarily set out to deal with the

fundamental ontology. This according to Elliot is pre-empted in his pre professorial lecture where in he

(Heidegger) dealt with the concept of Being by Aristotle14

. No doubt his impressive work Being and Time

encompasses the question of being and indeed what existence is in relation to the world.

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The early part of the above mention work by Heidegger portrays dissatisfaction with the previous

ontologies and thus connotes a call for a foundational ontology wherein the question of Being in the first

place will be raised. It is based on this task of fundamental ontology that he performed his ontological

deconstruction/ destruction. His concept of destruction of the previous ontologies though not a negative

task but shows the need to put away the ambiguousness of metaphysics which seems to becloud the real

inquiry into ontology and indeed philosophy. However, Heidegger conceives that the fundamental

ontology will be possible in the first place by the presence of a being which asks the very question of

Being – he traced Dasein.

Dasein however with all its essential qualities including its ontic and ontological function, creates

the meaning in the world by raising the question being. This questioning and understanding of Being is to

be carried out not just through a dogmatic means but through a method that is rational enough; distinct

from what Husserl calls a ‘science of natural sort’15

. Heidegger, like Husserl, took to the

phenomenological method. It is this method that leads Heidegger to both the existential analysis of

Dasein and further the analysis of other Beings. One of the fundamental aims of Heidegger is to breach

the hierarchical gap between Beings of different genres and thus restructure the subject- object relation of

the various beings. How successful Heidegger is in this task is questionable.

Heidegger made frantic effort to analyze being from the very base by asking the question of

being. The most interesting thing about his work is his analysis of Dasein in relation to time. This opens

up a wide range of ideas from the thoughts of the philosophers before him and creates a wonderful

foundation for the other philosophers after him. Heidegger’s contribution to philosophy is so enormous

despite the criticisms leveled against him. No one will doubt that many criticisms leveled on Heidegger

may have been as a result of an unfair hearing of his theories due to his Nazi association. Many

philosophers like Karl Popper, Mearleau Ponty, Hans White, and so on, found it difficult separating the

philosophy of Heidegger from his political inclination.

Nevertheless, we may not very correct to say that Heidegger was absolutely correct in his ideas as

the criticisms in the previous chapters show. Heidegger hid a lot of ideas or better still made himself

unclear in the Being and Time by his methodology of expression. Many scholars as a result became very

suspicious of him. However Kockelmans, on the other hand, found it as a point of strength explaining that

the vocabularies of Heidegger at times making use some old fashioned words such as befindlikeit makes

his work more original and dense16

.

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All these notwithstanding, Heidegger’s thought has a very deep insight into deeper truths about

the condition and nature of man. To say the least his work the Being and Time which focused on the

ontological deconstruction, x-rays the reality of what it means for one to be and what the attitude of man

should be in the world which he has no control over.

END NOTES

1. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time tansl. John Macquaarrie & Edward Robinson (New York:

Harper and Row Publ. Ltd 1962), 21

2. Martin Heidegger, 22

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3. Robert Dostal, Time and Phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger in Charles Cuignon (ed)

The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University

Press, 1993), 142.

4. Daniel Dahlstrom, ‘Heidegger’s Critique of Husserl’ in Theodore Kisiel & John Van Buren

(eds), Reading Heidegger from the start: Essays in His Earliest Thought (Albany: Sunny

press, 1994), 244.

5. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, 29

6. James Christian, Philosophy an Introduction to the Art of Wondering 7th

ed. (Canada:

Wadsworth 2003), 279

7. Jean Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism transl. Hazel Barnes (London: Methuen publ.

1968), 40

8. Luijpen, Man and the World Graham White’s Writing of Heidegger 1995, 84.

9. Farias Hans Slugger, Heidegger’s Crisis: Philosophy and politics in Nazy Germany

(Cambridge: University press 1993),149

10. See Samuel Enoch Stumpf, Philosophy History and Problems 5th

ed. (USA: Mc GrawHill

pub. Ltd. 1995), 388

11. See Benard Steigler, Psychological and Transcendental Phenomenology and the

Confrontation with Heidegger (Dordrech: Kluwer 1997), 14

12. Benard Stiegler, Techniques and Time, I: The Fault of Epimethus (Stanford: Stanford

University Press, 1998), 2.

13. Fredrick Copleston, A History of Philosophy vol. VII (New York: Double Day pub group

1994), 34.

14. Brian Elliott, Phenomenology and Imagination in Husserl and Heidegger , 186.

15. Edmund Husserl, The Idea of Phenomenology (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964), 17.

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16. Joseph Kockelmans, On Heidegger and Language (Evanston: Northwestern University

Press1972), 43.

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