Being Among Being and Beings

The basic groundwork for our Denkweg shall be supplied by Martin Heidegger. But don’t be frightened by the strange vocabulary! We shall see that philosophy, especially phenomenology, is actually quite forgiving when one doesn’t understand every single word, but does grasp the broader concepts, from which afterwards one may begin to understand the words — the basic method of hermeneutics. Though we don’t want to be dependent on convoluted philosophical terms, we do have to engage with some of them in order to reach a vantage point from which we can start posing questions which go beyond idle musings.

Phenomenology, as a more or less recent branch of philosophy, tries to answer questions by analyzing our experience. This may seem like a very ‘trivial’ method at first: Doesn’t science also explain reality through our experience, e.g. empirical research? Yet phenomenology has one important rule that sets it apart from all other sciences and philosophies: we try to presuppose nothing — the technical term for which is εποχή (epoché). Again we might be tempted to say that this is precisely what science does! But does science really presuppose nothing? One would have to delve more deeply into certain scientific fields to give a precise answer, but it is clear that neuroscience would be quite pointless if we didn’t presuppose that there is a connection between experiential content and MRI images, or physics if we didn’t presuppose the electron, or even more fundamentally that there are such things such as natural laws which remain constant! Where are the real experiences we have behind all these presuppositions? There are none. In his early work, Heidegger’s teacher — Edmund Husserl — even calls into question if we can experience our world as being real, and not imagined. He believes we can’t.

So what does all this mean beyond philosophical self-indulgence? Well Heidegger begins his magnum opus Being and Time by asking, in the aforementioned phenomenological fashion, how we are in the world, and before that why we should begin to ask how we are in the world. We do not want to summarize Heidegger’s philosophy here, but would rather like to pick out one concept that is fundamental for our question:

“Da-sein is a being that does not simply occur among other beings. Rather it is […] distinguished by the fact that in its being this being is concerned about its very being. Thus it is constitutive of the being of Da-sein to have, in its very being, a relation of being to this being.” — Being and Time §4, Translated by Joan Stambaugh

Dasein, to keep our discussion short, is who/what we are. All Heidegger says in the paragraph above is that we are inherently different from beings, from things such as stones or water — mostly inanimate objects, though an interesting argument can be made for/against the Dasein of animals. The reason we are different is that we do not ‘just’ occur in the world, but have a certain relationship with the world around us and more importantly ourselves, we give things meaning. This relationship may be called existence which is essential to us. We shall now see where the conflict with modern science, and Günther Anders arises.