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Being And Time
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BetaDivision 2, Chapters 3-4
Division 2: “Dasein and Temporality”
Division 2, Chapter 3 Summary
Heidegger says, “Along with the sober anxiety which brings us face to face with our individualized potentiality-for-Being, there goes an unshakable joy” (358). His enquiry has thus borne fruit. He has shown with his discussion not only how authenticity is theoretically possible, with death, but how, through conscience, it can be concretely realized for actual Dasein. This is a cause for “joy.” Despite our apparent lostness in the they, and the seemingly intractable difficulty of escaping it, a way out has been found. Further, to accomplish this ourselves, discovering our true self, would surely bring with it a similar sense of exultation.
Such joy, however, is not the only reward to come from Heidegger’s efforts. Along with it emerges a new type of experience and an accompanying understanding. As he says, “Temporality gets experienced in a phenomenally primordial way in Dasein’s authentic Being-a-whole, in the phenomenon of anticipatory resoluteness” (351). In other words, in the realization of authentic wholeness in resoluteness, we can experience and grasp our relation to time in a new way. At its most general, this relation is the realization that temporality fundamentally grounds every aspect of our being. This is radically different from the everyday conception of, and relation to, time. On such a view, time is a series of present “nows” that we inhabit in the same way we inhabit space. That is, time is seen as a necessary “stage” for our lives, which one day may vanish, but it does not essentially affect what we are at any moment.
In contrast, authentic being-towards-death puts us into a relation to ourselves as time. In standing in a relation to the possibility of death, we realize that we do not just have possibilities. Rather, we are possibility. We are the not yet actualized future that we are constantly striving towards. Likewise, our past is not a series of distinct present moments we once inhabited, like photographs in an album. Instead, linked to the future, it is that which we are constantly flying from, and hence something that defines us in that movement. By analogy, we can think of our relation to time in terms of a journey. A journey is neither “where we came from” nor “where we are headed” if these are understood as present-at-hand locations we occupy for any part of it. The journey just is, on a deeper level, both these elements and their unity. That is, if we understand the journey in terms of a process and a movement it is its individual “whence” and “where to.”
Division 2, Chapter 4 Summary
This cannot be a stopping point for Heidegger. Far from resolving all the questions that have arisen from an analysis of our everyday world, the revelation of time has meant that “the questionable character of everything obvious opens up for us” (383). In other words, the introduction of temporality, previously held in parentheses, to our earlier analysis is likely to reveal new problems and depths there. As such, to complete his account of Dasein, Heidegger must now take another step: He must look again at the analyses of our everydayness in Division 1, but in light of temporality. Only in this way can he hope to understand both Dasein and time.
Heidegger begins this project in Chapter 4 by re-examining two fundamental aspects of our being-in-the-world. These are moods and “fallenness.” Taking the former first, he looks specifically at fear and anxiety to see how the dimension of time affects our analysis. Fear, as seen, is an inauthentic mode of anxiety, concerned with entities in the world and worldly projects it might lose. Seen through the lens of temporality, though, we can understand it in terms of a certain inauthentic relation to time. As Heidegger says, “fear springs from the lost Present” (395). What this means is that fear is rooted in a desire to hold onto “present” moments and to evade the troubling incompleteness of past and future. In contrast, anxiety, when viewed through time, is revealed as essentially futural. It reflects a breaking free from present worldly possibilities and concerns and an orientation towards an unknown future.
Regarding our fallenness, Heidegger focuses on the phenomenon of curiosity. Curiosity, like fear, is constituted, temporally, by a preoccupation with the present. It is the constant effort to “make present,” and fully known, the future. With its endless pursuit of novelty, curiosity attempts to forget any concrete relation to its past, and itself, by fetishizing a denatured futurity. For that reason, it is manifest in the obsession with the modern, the contemporary, the “up and coming.” It is also for that reason perpetually unsatisfied by the future it tries to reclaim. Further, this discussion of the temporality of moods and fallenness reveals something significant about time itself. This is that an authentic relation to time consists in grasping a unified relation between past, present, and future. An inauthentic relation to time, meanwhile, carves up the different aspects of time into distinct, if not yet actual, “presents.”
Division 2, Chapters 3-4 Analysis
Towards the end of Chapter 3, Heidegger provides some justification for the unexpected methodological turn Being and Time is about to take. As he says:
By repeating the earlier analysis, we must reveal everydayness in its temporal meaning, so that the problematic included in temporality may come to light, and the seemingly ‘obvious’ character of the preparatory analyses may completely disappear (380).
Things are suddenly thrown into the air. Having grasped what seemed like a complete analysis of Dasein, with an account of its possible authenticity as well as inauthenticity, we are now told that these analyses were merely “preparatory.” It will now, we are told, be necessary to return to what was said in Division 1, and it will be necessary to reapply our newly uncovered understanding of temporality there.
There is also something more radical indicated. It is not merely that the subsequent chapters will veer around to complete the analysis of our being-in-the-world with the help of time. Nor is it just that doing so will show a proper account of Dasein to be more complex and counter-intuitive than supposed. It is also that we may be challenged as to precisely what kind of text we thought we were reading in the first place.
Since Being and Time is a work of philosophy, one might suppose in this instance that it followed the obvious structural norms of most such texts. Taking Rene Descartes’s Meditations on First Philosophy (1641) as a paradigmatic example, although most other philosophical works could serve as well, they involve the treatment of concepts in a distinct and linear “narrative” structure. This means a clear beginning and end, but it also means one concept, say “God,” or “mind,” or “external reality,” is itself and not something else. One can consider a play as a good analogy. No matter how complex the relationships between the characters, or the effects they have on one another, they retain their own voices. Othello remains Othello, Desdemona Desdemona, and Iago Iago. Similarly, philosophical concepts and the entities to which they refer can never entirely cease to be themselves.
This is the case even if these parts contribute towards some “higher” structure. Indeed, this might said to be true for Being and Time, for Heidegger remarks that “while Being-in-the-world cannot be broken up into contents which may be pieced together, this does not prevent it from having several constitutive items in its structure” (78). In other words, there are theoretically separable aspects or “items” of Dasein. While its being-in-the-world is ultimately a unified whole, the parts composing it can, at least methodologically, be understood in relative independence. This is an obvious way to read the text. As such, Dasein’s initial being-in-the-world is one thing. Then we can consider its involvement with equipment, its being with others, its potential for inauthenticity with the they. Then we can think about moods and discourse, and the various means by which Dasein might achieve authenticity. These elements also correspond to the chapter headings in the text.
However, as the point about time, and the necessity of rethinking Division 1, hints at, we might be facing a structure that is more troubling. Consider the “they.” As Heidegger says, “It ‘was’ always the ‘they’ who did it, and yet it can be said that it has been ‘no one’” (165). On the one hand, an explicit discussion of the they is confined to a single section in the whole text, section 27, and it is precisely “no one” and “nowhere.” It is also everywhere, affecting everything, however. It keeps growing, adapting, re-appearing in new forms, casting a shadow over both what comes before it in the text and what comes after. In fact, the nature of the they seems to be the one thing that ensures that Being and Time cannot follow a standard structure. In trying to understand it, and its liminal being, the text itself must subvert ordinary conceptions of argument and narrative. One can wonder, therefore, if this will affect the introduction of time into Division 1’s analysis as well. In short, one may ask if the they’s specter will re-emerge to challenge the sense in which the revelation of time, and authenticity, had been properly achieved in Division 2.
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