The Ego

Heidegger criticises Descartes for not thinking the sum of the Cogito ergo sum (Heidegger, 2008, p.46). We can think of the concept of Dasein as aiming at this Sum that creates the context such that there can be “I”s and “thinking” in the first place. Taking the thinking ego as the seat or exemplar of existence (being) makes a methodological mistake.

According to Heidegger, Descartes’ point of departure is not derived from the human mode of being in the world but rather from a metaphysical worldview which partakes in the way he — as a human being — is relating to the world. (Pearl, 2013, p.20)

This is to say that Descartes begins from an already established metaphysical position in order to study the beings that we are, but he doesn’t question that this metaphysical position is a product of the beings that we are (taking it instead as some prior or fundamental feature), and, what’s more, only a narrow mode of this being.

Thinking is not the only way of being of Dasein. Even if every instance of thinking carries with it an “I”, the being that we each ourselves are is not exhausted in the kinds of self-conscious reflection whereby the Cartesian ego is discovered. Most of the time we’re just busy getting “stuff” done. It’s this feature of us, these beings that we are, that Heidegger pays special attention to: Dasein in its “everydayness”. That is, Cartesian skepticism or intense philosophical reflection or scientific inquiry are obviously two ways of being that the beings that we are are capable of; as is scaling the north face of Mt Everest and being launched to the moon. But these impressive and rare capabilities of this entity that we are need to be understood as special cases of a more general, less exciting but no less mysterious, context. The general context of this being that we are “is to be shown as it is proximally and for the most part — in its average everydayness.” (Heidegger, 2008, p.37). The name for this is Dasein.

This is to say that prior to being this or that thing (a rational animal, a res cogitans, a brain, etc) we are firstly just being. Heidegger hopes to capture this being in its effervescent verb form prior to its reification into “I” and “thinking”.

Regarding what finances the need for this project, Esfield (2001) reads Heidegger’s dissatisfaction with the Cartesian and other previous inquiries as stemming from how they invariably result in false dilemmas as to what we are:

Heidegger’s diagnosis of traditional philosophy is that it fails to develop an adequate theory of ourselves, because it reifies ourselves qua minded beings: we are considered either as some sort of an entity over and above the physical (dualism, in particular Descartes), or as being nothing but some physical stuff among other physical stuff (reductive physicalism) (p.48)

Neither of these choices seems satisfactory because as Moran notes “they both treat human beings as present-at-hand entities [2].” (2014, p.493). That is to say, the person becomes a thing, like any other thing, whether that be a physical, mental or spiritual thing. Accordingly, Heidegger wants to go beneath these dichotomies to capture the peculiarity of human existence that precedes and encompasses both and all, not fitting easily into the category of thinghood [3]. Dasein is his road to this.

1. The Features of Dasein

Two features immediately inhere to Dasein: that its being is an issue for it, and that its being is in each and every case “mine” (its). (Heidegger, 2008, p.67)

1.1a Being as an issue for it

What does it mean to say that Dasein’s being is an issue for it? It is easiest to compare this stance to its opposite: indifference. The being of a lump of granite is a matter of indifference for the lump of granite. We can launch it into the center of the Sun to be vaporized into hydrogen, and this would be just one more thing that has happened to it. Not so with us.

However, we should not anthropomorphize Dasein any more than the lump of granite. That Dasein’s being is an issue for it, not a matter of indifference, is evinced by its (our) protestations immediately before being fired into the Sun, but it is not fully exhausted by them. Dasein’s being being an issue for it is not merely a survival instinct, or an affective preference for life over death. What makes it an issue is the peculiar way in which Dasein is vis-à-vis its “whatness”, that is, its essence.

1.1b On Essence and Existence

If I were to ask you “what is a house?” we could talk about the necessary and sufficient conditions and properties that form the essence of “houseness”, the “whatness” of a house, and eventually finish. It’s not even necessary that the thing we discuss in this way exist currently. For example, I could ask you “what is a perfect house?” and the subsequent properties and conditions we settle upon and write upon a napkin may not be instantiated anywhere in the world currently. This introduces an order of rank: the “whatness” of things, their essence, can be seen to exist happily prior to the thing’s existence, such that if we were to stumble across a really existing “perfect house” we can then say “That’s it!”

However, if I were to ask you “What are you?” there is a sense in which any answer you give will be unsatisfactory. Answering “I am a person” points us to the question of what you mean by that, and from there a myriad of possible answers come up: a featherless biped, a political animal, a rational animal, a Homo sapiens, so on and so forth. However, each of these definitional characterizations need to be actively taken up by you, receiving your blessing in a choice that precedes them all.

This perhaps becomes clearer if you were to answer “I am a massive Katie Perry fan”. No matter how much you believe that the fullness of your being is captured in this denomination, you can’t escape the feeling, nor the fact, that this is an action you have taken on, or have undergone, such that you now feel your entire being is captured under this denomination. Nobody is born into Katie Perry fandom.

The “person” example works in the same way, as does any response you could give, any simple ascription of a “whatness” onto your being. This is why Descartes misses Dasein when he thinks himself as “a thinking substance”. Dasein’s being is not answerable to a whatness, to an essence, that precedes it, but, rather, its essence lies in its existence, through which it makes various choices about what its whatness is and will be, not by contemplating, but by realizing them through living: “The question of existence never gets straightened out except through existing itself.” (Heidegger, 2008, p.33) In other words, Dasein chooses what it will be, and this is its essence. Or, more accurately, it is its possibilities, which open it up onto the future, and its activity of choosing, and doing, one or the other as ways of being.

The essence of Dasein lies in its existence. Accordingly those characteristics which can be exhibited in this entity are not ‘properties’ present-at-hand of some entity which ‘looks’ so and so and is itself present-at-hand; they are in each case possible ways for it to be, and no more than that. (Heidegger, 2008, p.67)

Thus, its being is always an issue for it, because it is always confronted with the question “what shall I be today, tomorrow, next year?”

Furthermore, its being is always an issue for it in the survival-instinct “don’t launch me into the sun!” kind of way as well, because it is also confronted with the question “Will I be tomorrow, next year, etc?”

Finally, its being is an issue for it precisely because it can think “what is Being?” and be troubled by such a question. This is a capability of Dasein, along with buying cabbage, calculating Pi, and saying “It’s raining cats and dogs out there”. Neither houses nor lumps of granite can boast that their being is an issue for them in any of these three ways.

1.2 Mineness

The second feature that inheres immediately to Dasein is that its being is always and in every case “mine”. This has two senses. Firstly, carrying on from its being being an issue for it, its being is an issue for only it. The question of “what shall I be next year” is my, and only my, issue, and I will only work it out through my own existing onto next year. Because I’m always working out my whatness through the business of existing, of doing and choosing and speaking and thinking and interpreting and making, and this issue always comes back to me, regardless of whether I let the world or others reveal certain facts to me, there is a sense that I am accountable all the way down [4]. In fact, Haugeland argues that this fundamental accountability for each of us being what we are, in the way we are, affords us a definition of ‘people’ vis-à-vis Dasein as mere “primitive loci of accountability” within Dasein (Haugeland, 2013, p.15).

Crowell (2001) also reads “Mineness” in a similar way, as Dasein being its possibilities, insofar as, lacking a prior essence, it has nothing else to be, so “(Dasein’s Jemeinigkeit [“mineness”]) must be understood as involving modalized possibilities for being itself.” (p.442)

The second sense in which the kind of being that Dasein has is always “mine” is just that we have no other way of experiencing ourselves or the world as being in any other mode than “happening here, by me”. Zuckerman writes that our access to being, because of this feature of mineness, is always “necessarily first-personal” [5] (Zuckerman, 2015, p.509).

These are the two features that inhere directly to the concept of Dasein. I’ll now look at the necessary structures of Dasein in its everydayness. Heidegger says of this distinction (between features and structures) that it does not mean that these structures are “just any accidental structures, but essential ones which, in every kind of being that factical Dasein may possess, persist as determinative for the character of its Being” (Heidegger, 2008, p.38). [6]