Martin Heidegger (original) (raw)

1. Life and Work

Martin Heidegger was born on 26 September 1889 in Messkirch Germany—a small, rural town in southwest Germany. His father, Friedrich Heidegger, was a skilled craftsman (a master cooper) and a sexton in the Catholic Church. Heidegger’s thought was profoundly influenced by the provincial environs of his youth, his conservative upbringing, and his intimate familiarity with craftwork and the rhythms of agricultural life. In 1909, he entered the University of Freiburg where he studied Catholic theology, the natural sciences, and mathematics, before settling on philosophy as his course of study. In 1913, he defended a dissertation on “The Doctrine of Judgment in Psychologism: A Critical and Positive Contribution to Logic”, and was awarded a doctorate in philosophy, summa cum laude (GA1: 59–188). He continued with advanced studies at the University of Freiburg, and was granted his license to teach upon completion in 1915 of a habilitation dissertation on “The Doctrine of Categories and Meaning in Duns Scotus”, written under the direction of the Neo-Kantian philosopher Heinrich Rickert (GA1: 189–411).

Between 1915 and 1923, Heidegger taught as a docent at the University of Freiburg. He became Edmund Husserl’s assistant in 1919, with whom he held “phenomenological exercises of seminars in common” (BH 108). Heidegger’s personal and intellectual relationship with Husserl was complicated and occasionally strained (see Crowell 2005). Despite harshly criticizing Husserl in private, Heidegger dedicated Being and Time to Husserl “in friendship and admiration” (SZ vi).

In 1923, Heidegger accepted an associate professorship at the University of Marburg, where he taught until 1928. During his Marburg years, Heidegger lectured on ontology, truth, logic, and offered phenomenological interpretations of key figures in the history of philosophy.[1] His lectures attracted students from around Germany, including Hans-Georg Gadamer, Karl Löwith, Hans Jonas, and Hannah Arendt. While Arendt was Heidegger’s student, they began a

complicated love affair—stretching across half a century, from 1925 to 1975 (and ending only when Arendt died, 6 months before Heidegger)—[that] raises numerous questions, not only philosophical but also biographical, psychological, political, and moral. (Thomson 2017: 454)

In 1927, Heidegger published his most important work—Being and Time, and was promoted to full professor at Marburg. In 1928, Heidegger was appointed to the chair previously held by Rickert and Husserl at the University of Freiburg. In Davos in 1929, Heidegger offered a series of lectures on Kant. The lectures were followed by a disputation with Ernst Cassirer. Friedman (2000) argues that this disputation was the hypocenter of the subsequent analytical/continental divide in twentieth century philosophy.

Shortly after Adolf Hitler became German Chancellor and seized plenary powers, Heidegger was elected Rector of Freiburg University in April 1933. He joined the Nazi Party on May 1st. As Rector, Heidegger was responsible for the “alignment” or “synchronization” (Gleichschaltung) of the university with the aims of the Nazi Party. In April 1934, a scant year later, Heidegger resigned the rectorship, although he remained a member of the Nazi party until the end of the Nazi regime. The significance for Heidegger’s philosophy of his reprehensible engagement with National Socialism, as well as his now well-documented anti-Semitism, is hotly disputed (seesection 3).

In the decade following his resignation as Rector of Freiburg University, and throughout the Second World War, Heidegger lectured extensively on Friedrich Nietzsche and the poet Friedrich Hölderlin. The philosophy of art became a central concern during this period. He also offered lectures on Schelling, Hegel, and the pre-Socratics.

Following Germany’s surrender in 1945, and hearings before a Denazification Committee, Heidegger was barred by the French Military Government from all teaching and university activities. The teaching ban was lifted in 1949, allowing Heidegger to take emeritus status from the University of Freiburg. Most of Heidegger’s intellectual work for the last decades of his life took the form of public lectures and published essays.

Heidegger’s later thought was increasingly preoccupied with the history of being, with the nature of language, and with the dangers of our technological age. In response to the technologization of everyday life, Heidegger worked to develop a non-calculative mode of thinking, and to encourage post-technological forms of “poetic dwelling”.

Heidegger died on 26 May 1976 in Freiburg, and was buried in Messkirch, Germany on 28 May 1976.

2. Being and Time

Heidegger’s declared aim in Being and Time “is the concrete working out of the question of the ‘meaning’ (Sinn) of ‘being’” (SZ 1). As Carman explains, Heidegger self-consciously orients his project in a way that

departs dramatically from traditional ontology in that it asks not_what there is,_ nor why there is what there is, nor even _why there is anything at all and not nothing_…. Heidegger’s question [is] … What does it _mean_for something to be? (Carman 2003: 8)

In asking about the sense or meaning of being, Heidegger’s inquiry is not primarily focused on linguistic meaning. Something has meaning in the sense that Heidegger intends when it _makes sense_—when we can take it up into our activities, respond to it sensibly, deal with it intelligibly, and so on. So “the question of being” could be reformulated as: What do we understand when being makes sense to us?

Because Heidegger focuses his inquiry on the sense or meaning of being, many interpreters of Heidegger attribute to him the so-called “intelligibility interpretation of being”—that is, the view that “what Heidegger means by ‘being’ just is intelligibility” (McDaniel 2016: 307). Dreyfus, for instance, explains that “being is not a substance, a process, an event, or anything that we normally come across; rather it is a fundamental aspect of entities, viz. their intelligibility” (Dreyfus 1991: xi).[2] Sheehan likewise argues that “we should always understand the misleading ontological terms ‘the being’ or ‘beingness’ of things as the intelligibility of things” (Sheehan 2015b: 22).[3]

Blattner criticizes the intelligibility interpretation on the grounds that it commits Heidegger to a dogmatic form of idealism—an idealism that would “follow from his stipulative definition of ‘being’”, whereas Blattner insists that Heidegger offers a “novel and important”argument for his idealism (Blattner 1999: 3). Rather than simply identifying being with intelligibility, Blattner argues that being “makes up the criterial standards to which entities must conform in order to be entities at all” (Blattner 1999: 5). Thus, being isn’t reducible to intelligibility, although our understanding of being is a necessary condition of entities being intelligible to us. Others argue that the intelligibility interpretation fails to do justice to instances where Heidegger uses the word “being” in a way that is_not_ tied to human understanding (Olafson 1987: 140). McDaniel points out that identifying being with_intelligibility_ would commit Heidegger

to the claim that an entity has being if and only if it is_intelligible to us_, and it is hard to square this bi-condition with [Heidegger’s] claim that some entities are modally independent of us. (McDaniel 2016: 308)

Thus McDaniel, like Olafson, argues that Heidegger uses the word ‘being’ in equivocal ways (see McDaniel 2016: 317).

Heidegger’s (apparent) answer to the being-question is that_time_ (or temporality) is what allows us to make sense of being—that time is “the possible horizon for any understanding whatsoever of being” (SZ 1). Thus, Heidegger intended to argue in Being and Time that only if and when “temporality temporalizes itself” “can entities manifest themselves as entities” (GA26: 274/211–2). Consequently, “[t]he fundamental subject of research in ontology … is temporality” (GA24: 22 / 16–7). Being and Time is, however, a notoriously incomplete work. Only about one-third of the book as originally conceived was ever published. The two published divisions of the book are largely devoted to an analytic of human existence in terms of time. Had the anticipated third division been published, it would have argued that “temporality is the condition of the possibility of all understanding of being,” and not just of human existence (GA24: 389). Heidegger also planned a Part 2 of Being and Time, in which he intended to demonstrate that the ontologies of Aristotle, Descartes, and Kant all rest on a conception of time. Together, Part 1 and Part 2 were meant to demonstrate that temporality “makes ontology possible” (GA24: 323).[4]

Despite its incompleteness, Heidegger stakes out a number of important claims about ontology in Being and Time. He argues for “ontological pluralism”—that is, for the idea that there are a number of distinct kinds of being, or that “things exist in fundamentally different ways” (McDaniel 2009: 290; McDaniel 2010: 688; see also McManus 2013; Turner 2010). Different kinds of being will have different ontological structures, and correspondingly different conditions under which entities of a particular kind can be said to be (see GA24: 169–170).

Heidegger also draws a distinction between being and entities,[5] and thus between ontological inquiries and ontic sciences.[6] An entity is anything that satisfies the conditions set out in an ontological “framework”. Heidegger thus uses the word ‘entity’ in a very broad sense. Material things—Austin’s “moderate-sized specimens of dry goods”—are entities; but so are actions and events (like the storming of the US Capitol on 6 January 2021), as are abstract objects (like numbers and sets, concepts and propositions).Being, by contrast, is “the basic character of entities”,—“that which determines entities as entities” (GA20: 195; SZ 1).

Heidegger also argues for what he calls “the truth-character of being”—that is, the idea that there “is” only being as long as there is disclosure, and that being needs us in order to be disclosed (see GA24: 25; GA73.1: 204). It is for this reason that Heidegger approaches ontology by way of an analysis of human beings in their role as being-disclosers. Because we are the beings that understand being, by starting with an inquiry into human existence we can

acquire an understanding of what it is to understand Being; and since what is understood in an understanding of Being is indeed Being, to grasp the constitutive structure of that understanding … will be to grasp the constitutive structure of that which is thereby understood. (Mulhall 2013: 18)

2.1 Kinds of Being

In Being and Time, Heidegger discusses primarily three kinds of being:

1. availableness (translated ‘readiness-to-hand’ in MR, and ‘handiness’ in SR);
2. occurrentness (translated as ‘presence-at-hand’ in MR, and ‘objective presence’ in SR); and
3. existence, which is the kind of being that characterizes human existence or ‘Dasein’.

But these three are never offered as an exhaustive list of the kinds of being, and Heidegger suggests that other kinds of being include: life, numbers, and perhaps nature.[7] Arguably, works of art also have a distinct kind of being (see GA29/30: 514; GA5: 5–6).

2.1.1 Availableness (Readiness-to-Hand)

An entity is available (or “ready-to-hand”) if it is “usable” or “serviceable” for some activity or task. Heidegger’s paradigmatic examples of entities that have_availableness_ as their kind of being are tools and instruments—broadly speaking, equipment. But it is not just tools like hammers that are available; most inanimate objects that we encounter in our everyday lives are disclosed in the first instance as available. For instance, because the sun is usable by us to tell the time, to light our activities, and to warm our houses, the sun is “something which is available with uniform constancy” (SZ 103). Rivers and the wind are usable for power and navigation; mountains are usable as a quarry of rock; the wood is usable as a forest of timber (SZ 70).

Heidegger’s name for the ontological structure of the available[8] is the German term Bewandtnis. MR translates this as ‘involvement’ and SR as ‘relevance’. But Heidegger has in mind a very specific kind of involvement that determines an entity as available. Hofstadter takes the definitive involvement of equipment to be its “way of being functionally deployed”, and he consequently translates Bewandtnis as ‘functionality’ (GA24: 233/164 & 96/68). Wrathall argues that what is basic to available entities is that each affords the doing of particular actions in particular contexts. Consequently, he argues that Bewandtnis should be translated ‘affordance’. In affording action, available entities “refer” to or stand in relations of “reference” (Verweisung) to a whole network or “context” of other available entities[9]—i.e., in affording some activity, equipment literally directs or sends its user on to other entities. For instance, when a fountain pen is available, this is because it affords writing. And in affording writing, the fountain pen “sends me” to the paper; the paper sends me to the desk and the chair; together, the chair, desk, pen, and paper guide me into the proper bodily stance for writing on the paper.[10]

Given the affordance-and-reference structure of the available, an available entity only “genuinely can show itself in its being” when we are engaged in using it.[11] Discovering the available requires not just an active response to it, but also a specific kind of seeing—one that is constantly taking in affordances in terms of their references. This kind of seeing is not a focally directed looking-at an object, but a constant perceptual monitoring of the entire context of action. Heidegger calls this circumspection: literally, looking around to take in “the manifold references of the ‘in-order-to’”.[12]

Thus, Heidegger claims, in our everyday encounter with available entities, we do not encounter objects with occurrent properties. Rather, what we encounter in the first instance are holistic contexts that are articulated into invitations to act, invitations which move us (i.e., “refer” us) to further affordances. The entities that make up the world are “not thing-like objects but significations” (GA64: 65), and “it is not things but references which have the primary function in the structure of encounter belonging to the world; not substances but functions” (GA20: 272). As Dreyfus explains,

when absorbed in coping, I can be described objectively as using the door as a door, but I’m not_experiencing_ the door as a door. In coping at my best, I’m not experiencing the door at all but simply pressing into the possibility of going out. The important thing to realize is that, when we are pressing into possibilities, there is no experience of an entity doing the soliciting; just the solicitation. (Dreyfus 2014: 256)[13]

2.1.2 Occurrentness (Presence-at-hand)

There is considerable ambiguity surrounding Heidegger’s use of the adjective “occurrent” (vorhanden) and the noun “the occurrent” (das Vorhandene). McManus identifies at least 36 (slightly) different shades of meaning (McManus 2012: 53 ff.), although many of these are undoubtedly best understood as aspects of a core meaning.

Cerbone points out that there is a broad distinction between a “generic” and a “restricted” use of the term “occurrent” (Cerbone 2021: 538). In the generic sense, Heidegger uses the term “occurrent” to indicate that something is actually or presently “in existence”. Any kind of entity can be occurrent in this general sense.[14]

In its special or restricted sense, something is occurrent when it has occurrentness (Vorhandenheit) as its kind of being. Heidegger’s paradigmatic examples of entities that have occurrentness as their kind of being are material things,[15] the natural things studied by the natural sciences (Naturdinge, GA80.1: 186–7), the kind of entities that are defined most precisely in terms of their spatial and causal properties.

Blattner emphasizes that the occurrent is independent of Dasein’s worldly activities: “to be as occurrent is to be present independently of Dasein and its social world” (Blattner 1999: 7). Although philosophers tend to take occurrentness as ontologically basic, Heidegger insists that what we encounter in the first instance and most of the time are available entities. Normally we are swept along in purposively engaging with available entities, which show up precisely in terms of their practical significance of us. Thus, for entities to show up as independent of our activities and interests, “there must first be a deficiency in the concernful dealings with the world” (SZ 61).[16] Instead of circumspectively taking in the network of affordances of a situation, the one who holds back perceives in the mode of “explicitly looking-at (Hinsehen) what is encountered” (SZ 61).

We also encounter the occurrent in cases of a breakdown in our ability to fluidly cope with the world—when, for instance, “a tool turns out to be damaged” (SZ 73). In such cases, our attention is drawn to the material foundations of available equipment, and “pure occurrentness announces itself” (SZ 73).

Heidegger claims that we have a mistaken but “natural tendency to regard all entities in the first instance as occurrent” (GA24: 92). This perhaps is because reflection and theorizing about the world typically involves the very type of holding-back and looking-at objects that reveals the occurrent. The tendency is exacerbated—or so Dreyfus argues—because the propositional language we use to talk about the world lends itself easily to representing objects as substances with decontextualizable properties.[17] In any event, Heidegger claims that in “looking-at” entities, “the understanding of being which guides concernful dealings with intraworldly entities _has changed over_” (SZ 361). Consequently, philosophical ontology almost inevitably takes the occurrent as having primacy.

It would be a mistake, Heidegger insists, to understand availableness as a subjective projection of use-properties onto entities that are in themselves “really” occurrent (see SZ 71). Available entities are individuated differently than occurrent entities, and they have different kinds of properties than occcurrent entities. Thus, there is no necessary one-to-one correspondence between an affordance and an occurrent object.[18]

2.1.3 Dasein

In ordinary German, the noun ‘Dasein_’ means_existence, but Heidegger appropriates the word to designate human beings. In referring to us as ‘Dasein’ instead of ‘human’ [_Mensch_], Heidegger highlights the fact that he is inquiring into our kind of being, and not engaged in an anthropological, psychological, or biological study. ‘Dasein’ picks us out insofar as we have an understanding of being (SZ 12).

Heidegger leaves open the possibility that there are other, non-human beings which also share our kind of being. He claims in Being and Time that “the sciences, as fields of human activity, have the kind of being of this entity (the human)” (SZ 11). He also claims that “language itself has Dasein’s kind of being” (GA20: 373). John Haugeland has inferred from such claims that Dasein is any coherent pattern that is “generated and maintained by conformism”.[19] But the textual support for Haugeland’s reading is equivocal at best. Heidegger never says that science or language _is_Dasein—rather, he says that such things share Dasein’s kind of being. Moreover, Heidegger in fact repeatedly uses ‘Dasein’ as a count noun,[20] and he explains that “the word ‘Dasein’ does not designate a way of being at all, but rather a particular entity, that we are ourselves, the human Dasein. We are each respectively a Dasein” (GA24: 36).[21]

In his later thought, Heidegger reverts to using the term ‘human being’ (Mensch) as the name for “the entity that we are”. ‘Da-sein’, usually hyphenated in his later works, is reserved as a name for “the place” within which a historical community of people takes a stand on its form of life. Da-sein, in other words, is “the locality dwelt in by mortals” (GA9: 373/283).[22]

In Being and Time, Heidegger reserves ‘existence’ (Existenz) as a term for designating Dasein’s kind of being. To mark out the ontological distinction between existence and other kinds of being, Heidegger uses the words ‘categories’ and ‘categorial’ to refer to the ontological structures of everything but Dasein. The ontological structures of Dasein are called ‘existentials’. And Heidegger uses the adjective ‘existentiell’ to refer to ontic instantiations of existential structures. For instance, being in a happy mood is an existentiell determination of an ontological feature of human existence—namely, the ‘existential’ of disposedness (seesection 2.2.3.1).

Existence is a kind of being that is essentially related to possibilities.[23] Because it is essentially modal in this way, Dasein can never be defined in terms of occurrent facts about it.[24] So for a Dasein, there is an indeterminacy surrounding what—or, rather, _who_—any given Dasein is, and that means that Dasein’s being is “at stake” in at least three ways. An existing being: (a) has multiple ways of being who it is (it can take on a variety of social roles—mother, poet, conservative, etc.); (b) has multiple modes of being—in particular, an existing entity can be in the mode of owning responsibility for itself (i.e., authenticity), or not owning responsibility for itself (i.e., inauthenticity); and (c) an existing being can decide to not be at all. To be a Dasein thus means: I always understand myself (at some level) in terms of the contingency of my current existence.

2.2 Being-in-the-World

Most of Being and Time is taken up with Heidegger’s analytic of Dasein’s ontological structure. This is because, as Carman explains,

the question of being, as Heidegger conceives it, is inseparable from questions concerning the understanding and the existence of those entities for which, or rather for whom, the question of being can be a question at all, namely, ourselves, human beings. (Carman 2003: 9)

Heidegger thus hopes to provide a foundation for ontology in general—a “fundamental ontology”—through an account of our understanding of being.[25]

The “fundamental structure”(Fundamentalstruktur) or “basic constitution” (Grundverfassung) of Dasein is “being-in-the-world”. Heidegger hyphenates ‘being-in-the-world’ to indicate that it is a “unitary phenomenon”. A unitary phenomenon is made up holistically of parts that cannot exist separately, and each of which is what it is only through its relationship to the others. The parts at issue here are the world (section 2.2.1), the ‘self’ who exists in the world (section 2.2.2), and the relational structure of being in (section 2.2.3).[26]

2.2.1 The World and Spatiality

The world we inhabit is a particular organized whole of different settings for human activity—factories and offices, homes and parks, transportation networks and shops, etc. Thus, Heidegger defines_world_ as “that ‘wherein’ a factical Dasein as such ‘lives’” (SZ 65). To fully appreciate this definition, we need to see that Heidegger quite deliberately develops his account of Dasein’s being-in-the-world by contrasting it with the Cartesian distinction between disembodied subjects and a spatially-extended material world. “The spatiality of Dasein”, Cerbone notes, is “fundamentally different in kind” from the determinate, mathematical spatiality that for Descartes is the mark of the “external” world (Cerbone 2013: 131).[27] This is not to reject altogether Descartes’ account of spatiality, but to limit its applicability to occurrent entities. The phenomenology of Dasein’s involvement in the world, however, shows that the Cartesian account of space fails to capture the distinctive spatial character of the world we inhabit.

The spatiality of the available is not reducible to an object’s position on a mathematically-determinable grid. Instead, its spatiality is structured primarily by differentials of usability. That is, “entities are near or far according to whether they are involved or not involved in, or attended or not attended to, in the activities that take place in that world” (Schatzki 2021: 690). As Dreyfus puts it, “[a] thing is near to me whan I am able to get a maximal grip on it” (Dreyfus 1991: 133).

Dasein’s spatiality or ‘existential spatiality’ is something that Dasein produces rather than merely finds itself in. Dasein’s concern for things and solicitude for other people “determines its ‘location’” in existential space (SZ 132). In other words, something is existentially near to me when it matters to me; far from me when it is irrelevant to my concerns. It is through_differentials of mattering_ that we come to organize the space of the available. Thus, Dasein is not occurrent at a position in Cartesian space. Instead, Dasein “is the arranging of space into a room for maneuver, a site of active responding to solicitations” (Wrathall 2017a: 230).

One weakness of Heidegger’s account, however, is that he never explains what role our material bodies play in constituting the existential space that we inhabit—other, that is, than pointing out that the way we inhabit space is not reducible to the physical and material features of a material body (a “corpus” or_Körper_). (For more on this problem, see Cerbone 2000)

2.2.2 Being-with and the Anyone

When Heidegger turns to the “who” question—who is the self or the agent who inhabits this practical world?—he initially focuses on the way that our everyday self-understanding is grounded in being with others.[28] Thus, there is an ineliminably social dimension to existence.

Being a Dasein involves others in a variety of ways. For one thing, we stand in identity-defining relations to others. A Dasein is a parent, a friend, an American, a teacher, and we experience the world in terms of such identities, each of which amounts to situating us with respect to others. In addition, what equipment affords or solicits me to do is structured by the existence of others. As Heidegger puts it, “the co-existence of others is often encountered in terms of what is available within-the-world” (SZ 120). If a field shows up as belonging to someone else, I am solicited to “walk along the edge of the field but ‘outside it’” (SZ 118).

Because my response to the world is intrinsically shaped by relations to others, Heidegger argues that “being-with” is an ontological structure of being-in-the-world. As a “being-with”, I am essentially keyed in to, and responsive to, the way others comport themselves in our shared world. This means, Heidegger points out, that each of us already has a basic “understanding of the other”—not a cognition or explicitly formulable kind of understanding, but one that is manifest in our ability to cope fluidly with the situations in which we need to act together.

In addition, the intelligibility of the world as we encounter it is, in the first instance, structured by socially-shared aims, norms, tastes, and standards. Heidegger refers to this social normativity as “the anyone” (das Man; translated in MR and SR as “the they”) because in grasping this intelligibility, we act as anyone would.[29]

Because the everyday world shows up as soliciting me to respond in the way that anyone would, Heidegger argues that the real self of everyday existence is “the anyone-self”.[30] As Knudsen explains,

when Dasein understands itself through solicitations inflected by social norms, it comes to see itself not as a unique individual but simply as one participant among many in the normative structure of a given group. (Knudsen 2023: 160)

This way of being a self disburdens us of the responsibility of choice, because it dictates what shows up as an appropriate response to any situation.[31] In Division Two of Being and Time, Heidegger will contrast the anyone-self with the authentic or ownmost self (seesection 2.4) If the anyone self does what anyone would do, the authentic or “ownmost” self “take[s] action in itself in terms of the ability-to-be that it has chosen. Only in this way can it_be_ responsible” (SZ 288).

2.2.3 Being-in

Heidegger argues that the “self” of everyday existence is the anyone self, meaning that we experience the world as soliciting us to do the sort of things that anyone would do. The “world” of everyday existence is a particular whole of equipmental contexts that sustain us in doing what one does in the world. But what does it mean for such a self to be in such a world? Dasein’s_being-in_, Heidegger argues, amounts to familiarity[32]—the kind of familiarity invoked when I say “I am at home in such-and-such a place”. Being at home in a place means being accustomed to the style and pace of life in that place. It means flourishing when participating in the activities that characterize such a place. And it means possessing the habits and skills to respond to the affordances of that world.

Heidegger identifies three structural elements that co-constitute being-in: an affective disposedness, an_understanding_, and discourse (i.e., an ability to articulate the world into intelligible features). Disposedness, understanding, and discourse are equiprimordial moments of our familiarity with the world (SZ 133). “Equiprimordial” structures are equally fundamental, and cannot exist without each other. So “understanding always has its mood [i.e., its disposedness]” (SZ 143) and “to any disposedness or mood, understanding belongs” (SZ 270). But for analytical purposes, it is helpful to discuss each component of being-in in turn.

2.2.3.1 Disposedness and Moods

A key structural feature of Dasein is our affectivity—our being disposed to respond in an immediate, felt[33] way to the situations we encounter. Heidegger names our structural affectivity ‘disposedness’ (Befindlichkeit, translated in M&R as ‘state-of-mind’ and in SR as ‘attunement’). The paradigmatic existentiell form of disposedness is mood, but other affective states like_feelings_ and emotions are also ontic manifestations of disposedness (SZ 138). The essential function of affective states like moods is to disclose how the entities we encounter “matter” to us (SZ 137). In a mood of fear, for example, entities in the world stand out and matter insofar as they pose a threat, are under threat, or offer a means of protection against a threat. (See Slaby 2008: 130ff for a detailed analysis of fear, and of Heidegger’s theory of moods more broadly.) As Golob explains,

in moods the world is manifest as mattering in various ways…. Prior to any kind of rational calculation as to what I should do, there must be an initial assignment of values to the various options: [disposedness] refers to the fact that we “always already” find ourselves operating against the backdrop of some such assignment. (Golob 2017: 25)

Heidegger argues that it is a mistake to think of disposedness as either “subjective” or objective”. “A mood”, he explains, “comes neither from ‘outside’ nor from ‘inside’ but arises out of being-in-the-world, as a way of such being” (SZ 136).[34] One way to see that disposedness is not a merely subjective feeling or “coloring” is to notice that our ability to engage with the “objective” world is enhanced by being in the appropriate mood. The most objective scientific research, for instance, depends on our ability to “look theoretically at what is just occurrent”, and that in turn requires a mood of “tranquil tarrying alongside” (SZ 138). In showing that “moods cannot be properly described as fleeting private feelings projected upon the world”, Dreyfus points to the fact that moods can be shared with others, and many moods are essentially social and public. Moreover, the moods we are prone to are shaped by the “longstanding sensibilities” of the culture in which we are raised (Dreyfus 1991: 172).[35]

Heidegger accords to the mood of anxiety a special methodological role in disclosing the contribution that disposedness makes to our familiarity with a world (see Ratcliffe 2008: 52 and Withy 2012: 195). Because anxiety is a breakdown in our everyday ability to engage meaningfully with the world, it lets us notice what otherwise is too pervasive to attract our attention: namely, that our ability to function in the world is sustained by an immediate, felt sense for how things matter. When overcome by anxiety, that mattering “collapses” and the affordances of the world show up as being “of no consequence” (SZ 186). In this breakdown, our preoccupation with everyday tasks falls away, leaving us with a clear view of the essential structure of our existence. We learn, in particular, that even when all else fails we still care about our being, and all the other things we concern ourselves with are rooted ultimately in this fundamental care. As McMullin puts it, we learn that “[t]o be a self is to be defined by care-laden openness to the world” (McMullin 2013: 17).[36]

It is a matter of some dispute precisely what phenomenon Heidegger has in mind when discussing anxiety. Stolorow has argued that Heidegger’s existential interpretation of anxiety “bear[s] a close similarity” to the affective state produced by emotional trauma (Stolorow 2011: 3). Blattner argues that “the core phenomenon of what Heidegger calls ‘anxiety’ are characteristic of what we today call _depression_” (Blattner 2006: 141–2). Ratcliffe, meanwhile, has observed that “Heideggerian ‘anxiety’ encompasses a range of subtly different experiences” (Ratcliffe 2008: 12). Perhaps we should see existential anxiety as disconnected from any particular phenomenal qualities. Instead, in anxiety everything I encounter in the world is experienced as lacking ultimate and intrinsic mattering.

2.2.3.2 Understanding and Interpretation

Heidegger defines understanding as “projection onto possibilities”.[37] The thought here is a straightforward one: to make sense of anything is to see it in its modal context. For instance, a minimal understanding of the game of chess involves knowing the possibilities for movement open to each piece (a bishop can move forward and back along a diagonal, while a pawn cannot move backwards and must advance along a file unless it is capturing another piece). A richer understanding of chess recognizes yet other possibilities—how capturing a piece with a pawn might weaken a pawn structure, or how an opponent’s move is setting up a king-side attack, or how an opponent is likely to respond if I castle queen’s side.

To be at home in a world is to understand it, and that means to possess the practical and cognitive skills for recognizing and responding to the situations and possibilities that one typically encounters in that world. When at home in a world, one typically responds immediately and confidently to the situations one encounters. This has encouraged a number of interpreters to equate understanding in general with “skillful coping”.[38] This “pragmatist” interpretation of Heideggerian understanding captures the anti-cognitivism of Heidegger’s account of understanding. “‘[U]nderstanding’ in the sense of one possible kind of cognizing among others”, Heidegger insists, “must … be interpreted as an existential derivative of that primary understanding which is one of the constituents of the being of the ‘there’ in general” (SZ 143). Other scholars, however, object that the “primary understanding” Heidegger refers to is not skillful activity, but projective seeing in terms of possibilities. The type of seeing employed in skillful know-how is perhaps the best exemplar of understanding as such, but it is not definitive of it (see Wrathall 2013b).

Heidegger defines interpretation as the “working out” of “possibilities projected in the understanding” (SZ 148). This working out involves enacting one of the possible ways of construing the situation in question: interpretation is “[t]he mode of enactment of the understanding … specifically as the cultivation, appropriation, and preservation of what is discovered in understanding” (GA20: 366). Interpretation, as MacAvoy puts it, “articulate[s] by focusing on one signification and carving it out of [a] whole” (MacAvoy 2021: 116). Many interpreters understand this articulation as “making explicit” what is grasped unthematically in the understanding.[39] Other commentators argue that interpretation consists in responding to some particular subset of the whole of affordances that we understand. But this need not involve any explicit thought or attention.[40] In either case, interpretation involves the enactment of one of the multiple possibilities open to an agent. Through that enactment, the agent’s understanding is developed, made concrete, and refined.

2.2.3.3 Discourse and Language

Heidegger defines discourse (Rede) as “the articulation into significations of the intelligibility of being-in-the-world—an intelligibility that is disposed”.[41] (SZ 162) In other words, discourse picks out the significant features of our active engagement with the world—the features that we understand, interpret, and to which we affectively respond when we are at home in the world. Discourse provides us with the ability to reliably recognize and skillfully respond to the recurring significant features that we encounter in the course of our active engagement with our surroundings. But primordial discourse can degrade into idle talk (Gerede). We then no longer possess the skills to pick out the rich, fine-grained features of situations that guide a genuine understanding. Instead, we make use of an articulation that is levelled down in such a way that anyone can understand it and talk about it: “Idle talk is the possibility of understanding everything without previously making the thing one’s own” (SZ 169).

In Being and Time and works of that period, Heidegger argued that discourse is a fundamental, pre-linguistic level of significations which forms the foundation of language: “[t]here is language”, he argued, “only because there is discourse, not the other way around” (GA20: 366; see also SZ 161). Language was thus taken to be a derivative phenomenon.

Scholars disagree however, on the degree to which discourse can be distinguished from language (see, e.g., Golob 2014: 105 ff., Withy 2021a: 136; Carman 2025: 71ff.; see alsosupplement: Heidegger on language). Some interpreters collapse entirely the distinction between discourse and linguistic utterance, or argue that Heidegger’s attempt to distinguish between language and discourse is “doomed to failure” (Lafont 994 [2000: 67]).

Being and Time, however, offers multiple examples of discourse that is neither linguistically structured nor linguistically expressible.[42] Even communication has for Heidegger a primarily pragmatic meaning: communication in the most general sense means sharing one’s orientation toward the “object” of discourse with others—“[i]t is letting someone see with us what we have pointed out” (SZ 155). And while in everyday communication, this co-orientation takes place “for the most part by way of uttering it in language” (SZ 272), communication does not require linguistic expression. For instance, in the call of conscience—Heidegger’s most important example of discursive communication—“the call dispenses with any kind of utterance. It does not put itself into words at all” (SZ 273). And “taken strictly”, the mode of discourse in the call of conscience has no content: “the call asserts nothing, gives no information about world-events, has nothing to tell” (SZ 273).

2.3 Everydayness

The avowed purpose of Division One of Being and Time is an analytic of Dasein “in its average everydayness” (SZ 16). The world of everyday Dasein is a concrete whole of affordances (Bewandtnisganzheit)—i.e., the ordinary equipmental contexts that sustain a particular form of life. This includes kitchens, bedrooms, houses, neighborhoods, towns, cities, shops, streets, bridges, boats, buildings, workspaces, and so on, all interlinked in a mutually sustaining whole (see, e.g., GA24: 233–4; GA64: 25). The norms that govern activities in the everyday world are social standards established by the anyone. The “self” of everyday existence is the “anyone-self”—meaning that, for Dasein in its ordinary life, the affordances that solicit a response are those that draw us into a conformist way of comporting ourselves. Heidegger describes this condition of inauthentic existence as “fallenness”.

Heidegger’s account of falling draws on the Christian theological tradition (and Kierkegaard in particular), and the word “fallen” is meant to capture the idea that, in everyday existence, Dasein “surrenders itself to the ‘world’ and lets the ‘world’ ‘matter’ to it in such a way that somehow Dasein evades its very self” (SZ 139; see also SZ 178). One surrenders to the world by becoming fully “absorbed in” mundane daily activities (SZ 175). There is, moreover, “a constant temptation towards falling” (SZ 177). At the same time, Heidegger protests that falling is misunderstood if taken as “a bad and deplorable ontical property” (SZ 176). Instead, he insists, falling must be understood as an “ontologico-existential structure” (SZ 176).

Treating falling as an ontologico-existential, however, leads to a potential problem for Heidegger’s account. As Mulhall points out, if fallenness is an ontological feature of Dasein, that would seem to make authenticity impossible.[43] Such concerns have led Dreyfus to argue that a distinction should be drawn between “fleeing”—a motivated desire to identify oneself with the social roles to which one is already assigned, and “falling”, understood as a properly ontological tendency in all Dasein to get absorbed in their activities (see Dreyfus 1991: 182, 228). “Simply by being socialized”, Dreyfus argues, “Dasein takes over the fallenness of the [any]one” (Dreyfus 1991: 235). This structural form of falling, moreover, is a positive constituent of Dasein’s familiarity with the world. Through falling into the world, we acquire a basic grasp of the intelligibility of everything we encounter.[44]

Carman argues that Dreyfus’s distinction between structural falling and motivated fleeing is at best, however, a partial explanation of Heidegger’s account of falling, since this would explain only why we find ourselves initially in a fallen condition. It would not explain why, as Heidegger insists, falling is “not just a prior condition of intelligibility, but an ongoing dynamic tendency, a perpetual pull away from authentic existence” (Carman 2000: 17). Carman and Käufer both suggest that the pull toward a banalized and inauthentic understanding comes from the need to coordinate with others: “everyday dealings … are tempting, insofar as we experience a constant pull to understand and articulate our possibilities in terms of the public discourse that is constituted in being with others” (Käufer 2021b: 314).[45]

2.4 Authenticity

Heidegger launches Division Two by turning the focus from the conformism of everyday existence to Dasein’s ability to be “authentically a self in primordial individualization” (SZ 324).[46]

How should we understand the distinction between inauthentic and authentic modes of Dasein? “You exist in the mode of_authenticity_”, Käufer explains, “if you have ‘chosen, or achieved yourself in your being’, and you exist in the mode of inauthenticity if you have ‘lost or only seemingly achieved yourself’” (Käufer 2021a: 71). For Heidegger, to “choose” or “achieve” oneself does not mean that we have a true, deep self that lies hidden and must be recovered (see Carman 2005: 287). Instead, Heideggerian authenticity, as the German word for ‘authentic’—_eigentlich_—suggests, “means an existence that is owned, or taken hold of” (Käufer 2015: 104). But there are, in the secondary literature, many different interpretations of what is involved in owning one’s existence.[47]

The Aristotelian approach, as advocated by Dreyfus, interprets authenticity as a kind of _phronetic_expertise—a skillful mastery at bringing out what is best in each concrete situation. Social norms on this view give us at best a rough approximation of what should be done, and thus the authentic person realizes that “social norms are not rules to be rigidly followed” (Dreyfus 2017: 40).

The transcendental approach interprets authenticity as the recognition of reasons and norms as such (rather than merely acting in accordance with norms; see, e.g., Crowell 2013: 277; but see Golob’s critique of the transcendental approach in Golob 2025: 159 ff.).

Blattner argues for a notion of authenticity as “self-ownership”, where to own oneself means “to be_loyal_ to who one now finds oneself to be” (Blattner 2013: 333). McManus similarly argues that “authentic Being-towards-death is a readiness to be what I am now, for that to have been me” (McManus 2015a: 259). McManus later elaborates on this view by arguing that the authentic person makes herself answerable for her actions by deciding what to do through an “all-things-considered judgment” that “pulls together … all the demands that [her situation] makes upon her” (McManus 2019: 1195).

Guignon argues for a narrative account. “Instead of tumbling into the frenzy and preoccupations of day-to-day existence”, Guignon argues, the authentic individual “lives each moment as part of the totality of life, and carries forward the past as part of a coherent, cumulative narrative” (Guignon 2000: 89).

Finally, commentators like Käufer and Wrathall emphasize the connection between authenticity and Heidegger’s account of fluid agency. Käufer explains that the authentic self is the self who “discloses possibilities that solicit only her, insofar as they are her own and are meaningful only on condition of her own guilty commitment” (Käufer 2021a: 76). Wrathall similarly argues that the Heideggerian self in general is a particular style of polarizing the affordances of a situation into particular solicitations to act (see Wrathall 2017b: 22). The inauthentic self discloses the solicitations to act that the conformist anyone would respond to. Authenticity, by contrast, consists in disclosing situations in terms of the affordances and solicitations that allow me to be the individual I have chosen to be.

For all their differences, each of these interpretations of authenticity agrees that the authentic self achieves a certain kind of integrity or “self-constancy” in contrast to the inauthentic anyone-self, who acts in ways that conform to publicly shared norms and expectations. Everyday Dasein acquiesces in pursuing whatever possibilities “may accidentally thrust themselves upon one” (SZ 264). This means that, rather than achieving an individual wholeness or coherence to its character, it finds itself “dispersed into the anyone”—into the tasks that one is expected to perform. The inauthentic person lets her life be “‘lived’ by the common-sense ambiguity of that publicness in which nobody resolves upon anything but which has always made its decision” (SZ 299).

The authentic person, by contrast, owns up to the responsibility for their own choices. This embrace of responsibility, Heidegger argues, is made possible by “the anticipation of death”, and by “taking over guilt in resoluteness” (see, e.g., SZ 305).

2.4.1 Death

The anticipation of death, Heidegger argues, “individualizes Dasein down to itself” (SZ 263). But few issues in Being and Time have proven more controversial than explaining Heidegger’s account of death and its relation to authenticity.

For starters, Heidegger distinguishes between several different kinds of “death”. This is because, Heidegger argues, different kinds of entities end in different ways. Merely living things come to an end when some event or process occurs that renders their bodies incapable of continued organic functioning. Heidegger calls this “perishing” (Verenden; SZ 240–241; see Blattner 1994: 53). But, Heidegger argues, “Dasein never perishes” because its kind of ending is “codetermined by its primordial kind of being” (SZ 247). The point is straightforward: defining Dasein’s death requires an understanding of what is distinctive about Dasein’s existence. Focusing on organic breakdown misses this.

But Heidegger draws a further distinction between the end of a human life, which he dubs “demise” (Ableben), and death (Tod) proper. Demise is an event that befalls a_person_, and renders her incapable of playing social and legal roles, of having experiences, or pursuing goals.[48] Heidegger calls demise “an intermediate phenomenon”, one that participates both in characteristics of perishing, and in characteristics of death in Heidegger’s specific sense.

Death proper befalls not us qua persons, but us _qua_Dasein. In distinguishing death from demise, Heidegger defines death as “_the possibility of the absolute impossibility of Dasein_” (SZ 250, emphasis supplied; see also SZ 329; SZ 262; SZ 306).

The death/demise distinction is important for Heidegger, because he takes it as a mark of inauthenticity that one fixates on demise to the exclusion of a proper relationship to death.[49] But some commentators argue that there is in fact no meaningful distinction to be drawn between death and demise. Philipse dismisses the distinction as “a mesmerizing play with words” that “does not contain significant philosophical insight” (Philipse 1998: 354).[50]

Other commentators, however, defend the idea that there is an important distinction to be drawn between death and demise. For instance, the “existential death interpretation” (or “EDI”) holds that the phenomenon Heidegger’s names “death” should be understood as the collapse of an individual’s defining projects and commitments, while “demise” names the absolute cessation of Dasein. EDI quite rightly highlights the fact the we humans ordinarily understand ourselves in terms of our existential projects and social roles. EDI thus argues that a breakdown in our ability to inhabit those roles amounts to an “existential death”.[51] When existential death strikes, “the meanings that once structured one’s life…, the possibilities that once beckoned, and the demands one once felt have become inert” (Blattner 2006: 149).

On this view of death, it is possible to survive or “live through” your existential death because a Dasein can continue to_be_ even when it no longer “exists” in the specific sense of inhabiting a social role (Blattner 2005: 315). Indeed, Thomson argues that death is something I must live through in order to become authentic. This is because “in the phenomenon of existential death, our selves get stripped of the positive, worldly contents they ordinarily seem to possess”, thereby liberating us to choose our own stand on being (Thomson 2021: 218; Thomson 2013: 273).

Other commentators adopt a dual-aspect approach to death—that is, “death” and “demise” are understood as naming two aspects of one and the same complete phenomenon. For instance, Mulhall interprets “demise” as naming Dasein’s “biological or organic end” (Mulhall 2013: 124). “Death” is that same end, but viewed in its modal aspects: “we must shift our analytical focus from death understood as an actuality to death understood as a possibility” (Mulhall 2013: 125). Similarly, Wrathall argues that the difference between death and demise is the difference between a possibility and the particular instantiation of that possibility.[52] On this modal interpretation, Heidegger’s analysis of death is meant to lead us to the recognition of the radical finitude of the possibilities open to us. Facing up to my modal finitude forces me to confront my responsibility for being who I am. Because I am temporally finite, each choice comes at a cost—to pursue one possibility necessarily involves forgoing other possibilities (SZ 285). And death reveals that no possible way of existing solves the core problem of existence—namely, that it will end (see, e.g., GA80.1: 144). In that sense, there is no objectively valid way to exist. And that throws back on me the responsibility of deciding for myself how to go on (GA80.1: 144).

Heidegger emphasizes the close relationship between anxiety and death. Anxiety is the mood in which I experience immediately the finitude of my future horizon of possibilities.[53] Inauthentic Dasein flees from this experience of nothingness, doubling down on its conformist adherence to everyday norms and identities. It seeks in this way reassurance that it is living as one is supposed to (SZ 267–8).

But authentic Dasein experiences in its finitude a liberating chance to take ownership of itself. Rather than fleeing from death, authentic existence will anticipate or _run forward toward_death (SZ 266). Anticipation does not involve “brooding over” death, or “thinking about death” and “pondering over when and how this possibility may perhaps be actualized” (SZ 261). Instead, anticipation consists in actively taking up and pursuing my finite existence as finite. This liberates me from feeling bound to whichever possibilities

may accidentally thrust themselves upon one;… for the first time one can authentically understand and choose among the factical possibilities lying ahead of that possibility which is not to be outstripped. (i.e., death; SZ 263)

2.4.2 Guilt and Resoluteness

Besides death, another fundamental source of finitude in human existence is our “thrownness” into factical determinacy. Heidegger argues that one is “never in control of one’s own being from the ground up” (SZ 284). Käufer notes: “We cannot determine or control biological or cultural factors that constrain the possibilities available to us” (Käufer 2015: 109).[54]

Heidegger argues that such factical thrownness places me in a state of existential guilt—a state of lacking justification for the being that I am. We always find ourselves already saddled with preferences, dispositions, and character traits that we did not choose. Or, to the extent we can choose such things, we can only choose on the basis of other preferences and dispositions that, for their part, we did not choose. Consequently, my basic or default state as a factical being is one in which I have an illusion of acting for reasons, but my reasons are not my own. At the same time, as Han-Pile points out, my facticity underdetermines who I am:

I don’t have any essence in the traditional sense of inalienable properties which, in conjunction with various empirical laws, would determine my comportment causally. (Han-Pile 2013: 302)

But this presents a problem: how can I express myself as an individual if I am never ultimately in control of my dispositions; if all of the norms to which I am beholden are inherited from the anyone; and if I have no fixed, inalienable character to which I must adhere?[55]

It is the call of conscience, Heidegger argues, that calls me back to the possibility of being my own self by forcing me to confront my existential guilt. There is considerable disagreement on how precisely this call is to be understood. Blattner, for instance, argues for a “transcendental” understanding of conscience, according to which “to have a conscience … is to be called upon to respond to norms” (Blattner 2015: 119). Crowell similarly reads conscience as that “by means of which we are able to think and act not merely in accord with norms but in light of them” (Crowell 2013: 170). Wrathall, by contrast, argues that the call works by showing me that there are no norms which can justify my existence. I take responsibility not because I must act in the light of norms, but by owning the fact that there are no norms that can tell me who I should be.[56]

To hear the call authentically, Heidegger argues, is “authentically to be the ‘guilty’ that you are” (SZ 287). That is, I become myself by first owning the fact that I can escape neither from my thrownness, nor from the lack of justification for my existence that comes with that thrownness. I then make up for acquiescing in the norms of the anyone by “choosing to choose to be a self” (SZ 270). Heidegger dubs such a choice “_resoluteness_”. As Han-Pile explains, “the choice of choosing oneself is made wholeheartedly in the sense that Dasein takes without reservation as much responsibility for itself as is allowed by its finitude” (Han-Pile 2013: 304).

In anxiety in the face of death, then, I disclose myself as defined by a particular, finite set of possibilities, each of which is unavoidably prone to nullity. In anticipating my death, I accept this finitude and thereby liberate myself to choose my own projects without the illusion that, existentially speaking, one choice is any better or worse than another.[57] In the call of conscience, I disclose myself as lacking any adequate justification for the being that I am. In resolutely taking over my existential guilt, I choose to be a self in full light of the fact that I will never be in a position to shed responsibility for my existence.[58] In anticipatory resoluteness, I integrate my projects and dispositions in such a way that I achieve “the constancy of the self”—i.e., a stable, individualized way of being-in-the-world.[59] Together, anticipation and resoluteness free me to resolve upon some set of possibilities that I have inherited from my world, and then work to take those possibilities over in an individual way. Following Kierkegaard, Heidegger calls this process of taking over in an individualized way a received form of existence “repetition” (see Watts 2021).

2.5 Temporality

The ultimate aim of the Being-and-Time project is to show that all kinds of being, and thus also being as such, are conditioned by and make sense in terms of their temporal structure. In the extant portions of Being and Time, however, Heidegger is primarily concerned with identifying the definitive and essential temporal structure of our human form of existence.

Heidegger argues that all human actions and experiences are temporally structured in that they involve a “retention” of the past and an “awaiting” of the future that together inform how the present shows up as soliciting us to respond (Heidegger refers to this as “a making-present that awaits and retains”; SZ 355).[60] Building a birdhouse; carrying on a conversation; listening to a symphony—all such activities involve responding in the present on the basis of the awaited future and the retained past (see SZ 353). Time thus structures all of our aims and activities: it is “the self’s way of letting itself be concerned about anything” (GA21: 339).

In addition, human existence is temporally structured in that to understand myself as a self involves recognizing myself as something that retains its identity across time. “Time”, Heidegger notes “posits the self as the one that can be encountered by something” (GA21: 340; see also GA25: 151 ff.).

In situating his account of human temporality, Heidegger identifies several different types of temporality which stand in a hierarchy of more or less fundamental forms. In order of decreasing fundamentality, these include:

1. Temporality with an upper-case ‘T’ (Temporalität)—time as “the condition of the possibility of the understanding of being and of ontology as such”[61] (GA24: 324);
2. temporality with a lower-case ‘t’ (Zeitlichkeit)—Dasein’s temporal structure, in virtue of which we are simultaneously ahead-of-ourselves, already-being-in (a world) and being-amidst (entities encountered in the world) (SZ 327);
3. “world-time”—“the time within which worldly events and natural processes in the narrower sense fall” (GA21: 248);
4. “the ordinary understanding of time”—also known as “now-time”, or time understood as a flowing stream of now-moments. (SZ 330–1)

and

1. “the traditional [or philosophical] time concept”—time as a neutral container of changes, measured out by now-moments, which moments are dimensionless points used to demarcate and count change.

Heidegger argues that(3)-(5) are derived from Dasein’stemporality (2).

Since Aristotle, philosophers have conceived of time as the universal “container” or “coordinator” of the experience of change or motion. And Heidegger too thinks of world-time as “an embracing horizon within which that which is given can be ordered with respect to its succession” (GA24: 356–7). But, for him, temporality does more than merely “contain” changes. It also plays a constitutive role in disclosing entities and events. Time determines the significance of situations by setting them in relation to the no-longer, the not-yet, and the now. To make sense as an entity is to show up in relation to temporal horizons.

The ordinary understanding of time misunderstands the constitutive role of time because it flattens time down to “a manifold and succession of nows” (GA24: 385). The nows “arrive and disappear like entities, they pass away like something occurrent into what is no-longer-occurrent” (GA24: 385). But, Heidegger argues, the focus on a “bare” succession of now moments covers up the full rich experiential qualities of world-time. World-time, Heidegger argues, “can be structurally and completely characterized” in the following way: “it is datable, spanned, public, and belongs as structured in this way to the world itself [i.e., it is significant]” (SZ 414). For an extended elaboration of Heidegger’s account of world-time, see Herrmann 2023: 183ff.

In saying that times are datable, Heidegger means that each moment of time is defined by the events that have occurred, may yet occur, or are occurring at that moment. Each moment is also defined by its relations to other moments of time (see SZ 407). To say that time is spanned is to observe that moments are not experienced as dimensionless points. They stretch from the previous moment to the subsequent moment, and they have a “varying span” that is determined by the events occurring within them: “‘now’—during the recess, while one is eating, in the evening, in summer; ‘then’—at breakfast, while climbing, and so forth” (SZ 409). Thus, Heidegger argues, “no now and no time-moment can be punctualized. Every time-moment is spanned within itself, whereby the span’s breadth is variable” (GA24: 373).

Because times take their character from changes in the entities and events that date them, and because those entities and events are accessible to others, the nows are also public: they are shared by everyone within the world and experienced as given, and we can use them to reckon on each others actions (see SZ 412–3).

Finally, to say that time has significance is to say that one time differs from another in terms of its appropriateness or unsuitability for specific worldly activities. World-time thus always shows up as a time that “has innately the character of ‘the time for something’ or ‘the inopportune time for something’” (SZ 414).

Originary temporality, by contrast, consists not in a sequence or flow of now-moments, but in our holding open and “ecstatically” being carried away toward horizons of meaning that inform our understanding of entities or of being. Dasein “temporalizes” by purposively “awaiting” the future, dispositionally “retaining” the past, and concernfully engaging with the present (see SZ 407). It is only for a being that is open to horizons like these, Heidegger contends, that ordinary time can be manifest. That is, world-time can only be datable, spanned, public and significant because Dasein is the kind of being that can hold open the domain within which time moments relate to each other. Heidegger thus refers to Dasein’s temporality as “original time” or “primordial time” (ursprüngliche Zeit), while world-time “arises from” or is derived from temporality “temporalizing” itself (see SZ 329).

Scholars have debated how successful Heidegger is in identifying “an ontological meta-level” of originary temporality (Fleischer 1991: 25). Fleischer argues flatly that “there is no originary temporality” (Fleischer 1991: 25; for a response to Fleischer, see Dahlstrom 1995).

Blattner argues that Heidegger’s account of the derivation of world-time from primordial temporality fails. This is because, Blattner maintains, there is one feature of world-time that cannot be derived from temporality: the sequentiality of the flow of now-moments. Heidegger insists emphatically that the future, present, and past (or “beenness”) of originary time are horizons, not events. They do not happen in a sequence (SZ 329). But when we find a specific time to be significant and datable, this is because we are aware of the sequential relations between times. “This sequence of world-time times”, however, is not fixed by any feature of Dasein’s temporality (Blattner 1999: 181–2). Thus, Blattner contends, “there is a residuum of unexplained ‘time-likeness’, namely, sequentiality, in the sense of ‘one-after-the-other-ness’” (Blattner 1999: 184). Blattner concludes that Heidegger’s effort to derive world-time from Dasein’s temporality is a failure, and suggests that the entire explanatory project of Being and Time fails along with it (Blattner 1999: 232).

A variety of responses to Blattner’s critique have been advanced. McMullin has argued that it is the public and thus shared, intersubjective character of temporality that explains the sequentiality of world-time. “Sequentiality”, she argues, “depends on the recognition of times other than my own—_nows other than this now_” (McMullin 2013: 126–7).

Rousse, following a suggestion by Dreyfus, argues that the sequentiality of world-time is a composite product of Dasein’s temporality and a sequentiality present in the “movements of nature” that exists quite independently of Dasein. Rousse thus concludes that

the composite intertwining of the endogenous sequentiality of events in nature and Dasein’s originary temporality gives rise to the linear sequence of meaningful moments that Heidegger calls “world-time”…. In other words, world-time is a_co-production_ of Dasein’s non-sequential originary temporality and the endogenous sequentiality of events in nature. (Rousse 2022: 206)

Because Dasein is temporal, Heidegger argues, it can also “historize”—that is, we always encounter situations on the basis of a set of dispositions, skills, practices, and projects that we have inherited from our community—a community that itself is a vibrant embodiment of the past. This past, in turn, opens up a set of possibilities which determine the significance of, and delimit the availability of, the options for action that are open to us at any given moment. In this way, we exist as beings who always have a future in terms of a past that has been “handed down” to us (see SZ 385ff.; Watts 2021: 635).

2.6 Reality

One of the enduring problems in modern philosophy concerns the reality or ideality of the so-called “external world”. In_Being and Time_, Heidegger argues that philosophical debates between realists and idealists exhibit a deep confusion that results from a failure to distinguish between different kinds of being (in particular, between the occurrent, the available, and Dasein).

To help sort through this confusion, Heidegger distinguishes four questions that pick out different issues in the general problem of the reality of the external world:

Q1.

Are there mind-transcendent entities?

Q2.

Can we prove the reality of the external world?

Q3.

Can we know the external world as it is in itself?

Q4.

Is reality dependent on us—that is, on Dasein’s understanding of being?[62]

With regard to the first two questions, Heidegger argues that both are based on an ontological muddle.Q1 presupposes that we are subjects, locked in the “cabinet of consciousness” (SZ 62), trying somehow to establish contact with occurrent entities. As Cerbone points out,

any question of how something in a “subject’s” “inner sphere” relates to something “outer” requires some antecedent justification for raising the question of knowledge in those terms. (Cerbone 2005: 253)

Once we understand that we are beings-in-the-world—and that means that standing in relation to worldly entities is a constitutive condition of our own existence—then this undermines the motivation to doubt that available entities exist.

RegardingQ2, Heidegger argues along the same lines that the whole project of proving the reality of the external world aims to demonstrate the occurrentness and thus Dasein-independence of the world. But if the world—that wherein Dasein dwells—is properly understood as constituted in relationship to Dasein, then we can see how muddled it is to try to demonstrate the world’s independent reality. The scandal of philosophy is not, (as Kant had it), that philosophers have failed to refute skepticism about the world.

The “scandal of philosophy” is … that such proofs are expected and attempted again and again. Such expectations, aims, and demands arise from an ontologically inadequate starting point. (SZ 205)

Q3 andQ4 show, however, that we can still raise skeptical questions about our understanding of the occurrent, even if doubts about the existence of the available and of the world are dismissed. Q3 can be heard as asking: do we have any way of encountering occurrent entities as world-independent substances with world-independent properties (i.e., the purely occurrent)? Scholars are divided on how best to read Heidegger’s answer to this question. (See, e.g., Glazebrook 2001a, 2001b; Rouse 1981; Dreyfus 2017: 109ff.)

Q4 forces us to consider the implications of Heidegger’s view that being depends on Dasein. After all, a central tenet of Being and Time is the claim that entities depend for their being on being.[63] Heidegger also holds that being depends on Dasein.[64] Given those commitments, one might expect Heidegger to offer an idealist response toQ3 & Q4—to insist, that is, that the real is dependent on us, and thus that we cannot know the real as it is in itself. But, contrary to expectation, Heidegger argues that “entities are independent of the experience, familiarity, and grasping through which they are disclosed, discovered, and determined” by us (SZ 183).[65]

Not surprisingly, these claims have generated a wide variety of interpretations of Heidegger’s considered response toQ3 andQ4.

Dreyfus has argued that Heidegger is a “robust realist”, meaning that he is committed to the idea

that science can in principle give us access to the functional components of the universe as they are in themselves in distinction from how they appear to us on the basis of our daily concerns, our sensory capacities, and even our way of making things intelligible. (Dreyfus 2017: 109–10)

Glazebrook also views Heidegger as a “robust realist”, albeit one who “holds antirealist assumptions”—for instance, that “the idea of a reality independent of understanding is unintelligible” (Glazebrook 2001b: 362).

Carman has argued for an “ontic realist” interpretation of Heidegger, according to which entities depend on being for their intelligibility but not for their bare existence (Carman 2003: 158).

Blattner and Han-Pile have argued that Heidegger is an “ontological idealist” or a “transcendental idealist” who, like Kant, distinguishes between empirical and transcendental standpoints from which to try to answer questions like Q3 and Q4. From the empirical standpoint we can see that occurrent entities do not depend on us for their causal properties. But, Blattner argues, from the transcendental standpoint we end up suspending our ability to pose meaningfully the question whether entities depend on us. Thus, Blattner concludes, Heidegger is neither an idealist nor a realist about entities, because the question whether the real depends on us for its mere existence is “unanswerable” (Blattner 1999: 242ff.). Han-Pile does not think that Q3 is unanswerable. But she does argue that any reference to the real “must remain purely negative” (Han-Pile 2005: 97).

McDaniel agrees that Heidegger is a kind of idealist about being—that “being and modes of being are creatures of Dasein’s _understanding_” (McDaniel 2016: 317). But, he argues, entities are in a “different way” than being, and thus “there are possible situations in which physical objects exist and no Dasein does” (McDaniel 2016: 317). Gabriel similarly holds that Heidegger is an ontological anti-realist, having tied being to the understanding, while rejecting ontic anti-realism (Gabriel 2015: 198).

Cerbone argues that Heidegger’s intent is “to overthrow both [realism and idealism]” because both ultimately “take for granted the legitimacy of the subject-object distinction, and seek to explain one in terms of the other” (Cerbone 1995, 418).

2.7 Truth

In Being and Time, Heidegger articulates an understanding of truth that shapes much of his subsequent thought. There are two aspects to Heidegger’s account of truth; we might call these_the Historical Thesis_ and _the Thematic Thesis_respectively.

The Historical Thesis holds that early Greek thinkers like Parmenides and Heraclitus understood truth as unconcealment—that is, as bringing things out of concealment into the open. Heidegger claims, moreover, that the Greek word for truth—_alētheia_—reflects this primordial understanding. Heidegger (and others) take alētheia, etymologically speaking, as a privative word: _a-lētheia_is that which is un-hidden (see Friedländer 1964 [1969/1973: 221–2]). Heidegger claims that it was only later—“from the time of Aristotle, or rather Plato”—that “the name _alētheia_abruptly became the designation of the correctness of the proposition” (GA45: 99–100).

Heidegger’s historical thesis, as well as his etymology of_alētheia,_ was pointedly criticized by Friedländer. In the 1954 edition of his book on Plato, Friedländer argued_contra_ Heidegger that “the Greek concept of truth did not undergo a change from the unhiddenness of being to the correctness of perception” (Friedländer 1954 [1958: 220]). As it turns out, both Heidegger and Friedländer ended up moderating their historical claims. For his part, Friedländer ultimately conceded that “it has become clear that the aspect of unhiddenness most stressed by Heidegger was present very early” (Friedländer 1964 [1969/1973: vii]). And Heidegger conceded that the earliest Greek thinkers did not recognize the significance of the word_alētheia_.[66]

The Thematic Thesis holds that (regardless of the way that the early Greeks understood truth) the structure of truth in general is best understood as unconcealment. Heidegger identifies at least four different kinds of truth that participate in the logic of unconcealment:

(1)

Propositional truth: an assertion or belief is true when it “points out” or uncovers an entity in a state of affairs. (see SZ 218; GA21: 112–3)

Heidegger claims, however, that assertions can only uncover a state of affairs if there prevails a broader, pre-linguistic uncovering of entities that Heidegger calls:

(2)

Ontic truth: an entity is uncovered as what it is on the basis of our having well-articulated practices for encountering it—that is, it can show up as what it is because we know how to cope with it, have the right dispositions for using and responding to it, and so on.

Uncovering entities, however, requires the disclosure of_being_—i.e.,

(3)

Ontological truth: “Ontological truth is the primordial truth about entities, because it discloses in advance what is essential about the being of entities”. (GA25: 193)

In his later work, Heidegger further elaborates on the “primordial essence of truth” by developing an account of the conditions under which a particular understanding of being can prevail. This leads him to the phenomenon of

(4)

Truth as clearing, i.e., the unconcealment of historical worlds or historical understandings of being (e.g., the medieval Christian style of being, the modern style of being, the technological style of being). (See, e.g., GA65: 422–3; Sikka 2021)

Withy has argued, however, that the clearing is not a genuine phenomenon of unconcealment.[67]

Heidegger argues that propositional truth is best understood as one species of a broader genus of unconcealment, and he tends to use the words ‘truth’ and ‘unconcealment’ interchangeably, with the word ‘truth’ functioning as a general term to refer to any kind of unconcealment. Tugendhat, amongst others, criticized Heidegger for losing sight of a specific and core quality of truth: truth, unlike unconcealment, is specifically opposed to falsehood. Tugendhat also charged Heidegger with illegitimately transfering the normative status of truth to the unconcealment of being (see Tugendhat 1967). The validity of Tugendhat’s critique has been much debated (see Dahlstrom 2001: 394ff.; Wrathall 2011: 34ff.) For his part, Heidegger eventually conceded that it is “misleading” to call any type of unconcealment “truth” (see GA14: 86 / OTB 70). But Heidegger never abandoned the fundamental contours of his view about unconcealment.

Because Heidegger understands propositional truth as uncovering, he departs in an important respect from many prominent theories of propositional truth. While preserving the idea that assertions get it right about how things are, he rejects theories of correspondence which understand correspondence as a relationship that obtains between a mental representation and a state of affairs.[68] Rather, a disclosive stance agrees or “corresponds” with the world when it allows the state of affairs to show itself as it is in itself. Heidegger explains:

correspondence is ultimately comportment’s tuning-itself-in … to that which it comports itself toward…. From this it follows: truth as such a correspondence is not a character of the assertion as assertion, but rather of the assertion as comportment. (GA80.1: 353)[69]

Commentators differ on whether such passages indicate that Heidegger holds on to a suitably redefined notion of correspondence(see, e.g., Wrathall 2011: 47 ff.), or whether he rejects the concept of correspondence in favor of a more naive view of truth as correctness (see Carman 2015). But either way it is clear that Heidegger does not reject the commonsensical idea that beliefs or assertions are true in virtue of their agreement with the world. “In proposing our ‘definition’ of ‘truth’ we have not shaken off the tradition”, Heidegger insists, “but we have appropriated it primordially” (SZ 220).

Because he thinks propositional truths are only expressible in the light of an ontological disclosure, Heidegger questions the universality of truth. If an assertion can only be true when certain background conditions obtain, he argues that we should abandon the idea of timeless propositional truths.[70] At the same time, Heidegger insists that this does not lead to a radical relativism or constuctivism about entities, because

[o]nce entities have been uncovered, they show themselves precisely as entities which beforehand they already were. Such uncovering is the kind of being which belongs to “truth”. (SZ 227; see also GA24: 315 / 220–1)

Heidegger’s view, then, is that a propositional truth is relative to a particular world disclosure, but that what is discovered through the proposition is not necessarily produced in and through its discovery.

2.8 The Unfinished Project of Being and Time

As noted already, the extant text of Being and Time consists principally of Heidegger’s account of existence, the being of Dasein, and his preliminary working out of time as the ground of existence. It also offers some indication of how the available and the occurrent are rooted in different ways in which time is “schematized” or “temporalizes itself” (see Blattner 2021b: 759).

Left undone was the project of demonstrating that “being at large or in general … is determined by time” (Blattner 2021a: 727).[71] This was to have been accomplished in Division Three of Part I of_Being and Time_, regarded by Heidegger himself as “the most important Division” of the entire work (GA49: 40). But Division Three was never published.[72]

Also left undone was Part II of _Being and Time_—a “deconstruction” of various historical accounts of ontology that was meant to show how, throughout the history of metaphysics, time has been experienced as a fundamental determiner of being (see SZ 22). In the years following the publication of Being and Time, Heidegger did in fact make some efforts at this historical deconstruction. He offered a series of lecture courses that looked at the “problematic of temporality” in the work of Aristotle, Descartes, Leibniz, and Kant (see, e.g., GA24, GA25, GA26, and GA83). Heidegger focused on Kant in particular, arguing that “Kant is the only philosopher who even suspected that the understanding of being and its characteristics is connected with time” (GA21: 194). At the same time, Heidegger concluded that “Kant … held firm to the traditional concept of time” and this “blocked him from achieving a fundamental understanding of the problem” (GA21: 194). As Shockey explains, Heidegger’s reading of Kant is premised on a “violent” interpretive move: “Heidegger equates [Kant’s conception of] imagination with SZ’s 'originary temporality’,” and thus roots synthetic a priori knowledge in temporality (Shockey 2021: 133). The resulting interpretation of Kant, however, is nuanced, and there is considerable scholarly disagreement over how best to characterize Heidegger’s Kant interpretation.[73]

In any event, within a few years of its publication in 1927, Heidegger abandoned the project of Being and Time, conceding that “it was a delusion” to think he could complete it (GA49: 40).[74]

Scholars disagree on the reasons for Heidegger’s abandonment of the project. Blattner suggests that Heidegger gave up the attempt to show that all ontology is grounded in Dasein’s temporalizing simply because “the argument for it does not work” (Blattner 1999: 290).

Withy argues that the project failed because Heidegger had not adequately recognized the self-concealing character of being: “it is not just that we don’t fully ‘get’ being. It belongs to how being works that it withholds itself from us and so makes itself question-worthy” (Withy 2015: 311).Being and Time, on this view, fails because it misses out on “the most fundamental … feature of meaning: that it works by effacing itself” (Withy 2015: 324).

Some scholars pin the blame on the transcendental-metaphysical style of _Being and Time_—a style Heidegger soon came to repudiate.[75] Thus Raffoul, for instance, argues that the abandonment of the project represents not so much a failure as the recognition that what it was after “could not be pursued within the structure, language, and orientation of the 1927 treatise” (Raffoul 2015: 239, quoting GA9: 328).

Many scholars account for Heidegger’s abandonment of the project by pointing to his new appreciation of the history of being. As Thomson explains, Heidegger came to believe

that the ontological posits that guide each of our positive sciences come not from some unchanging fundamental ontology beneath all of Western history but rather from our contemporary age’s reigning ontotheology. (Thomson 2015: 297)

And Heidegger, in retrospective commentaries on why he gave up on the project, does indeed often single out the fact that he came to believe that there is an historical dimension to ontology that his account in_Being and Time_ missed.[76] To be specific, the account of temporality developed in Being and Time could not account for the historical variation in understandings of being:

History does not merely pass over into another epoch within the previous time-frame (Zeit-raum) of metaphysics; rather the time-frame itself becomes a different one (GA71: 76).[77]

3. Nazi-Era Writings

The most controversial issue in contemporary discussions of Heidegger’s work is that of determining the extent to which his thought is compromised by the public and spectacular character of his moral failings. Heidegger’s support for the National Socialist movement, and his use of Nazi and anti-Semitic language and tropes, has been amply documented and exposed (see Denker & Zaborowski 2009a; Ott 1988 [1993]; Farias 1987 [1989]; Faye 2005 [2009]). It is no longer possible to doubt that, as Julian Young puts it, Heidegger was “a real Nazi: his involvement was a matter of conviction rather than compromise, opportunism, or cowardice” (Young 1997: 4). He was also “an unabashed anti-Semite”, and “a strong supporter of Hitler and the Nazis from 1930 through at least 1934” (Sheehan 2015a: 368). It is also now clear that, after the war, Heidegger repeatedly lied or distorted the record to conceal the character and depth of his political activities in support of the Nazi movement during the Hitler regime. Moreover, he never publicly and explicitly renounced his support for National Socialism. On the rare occasions when he addressed the Holocaust, he deflected attention away from the question of German guilt by, for instance, equating the Shoah with the repressive Soviet occupation of East Germany.

While the basic facts of the Heidegger case are by now well-known, there are widely disparate interpretations of the significance of these facts for an understanding of Heidegger: was he a base opportunist, taking advantage of a revolutionary movement to advance his own aims? Was he politically naïve? Was he, as he later claimed, hoping to use the rectorship to protect the university from “unsuitable persons” and from “the threatening supremacy of the party apparatus and the party doctrine” (GA16: 574–5)? Was he, as he also claimed, trying to temper the basest impulses of the Nazi party, and lead the movement in a more positive direction (see GA16: 377)? Or was he a true believer in Hitler and Hitler’s National Socialism—an enthusiastic sympathizer with and accomplice to the Nazi agenda for “German rebirth”? There is a large and expanding literature devoted to exploring these issues, and philosophers have staked out a very broad range of positions on these questions (see Denker & Zaborowski 2009b; Bourdieu 1988 [1991]; Ott 1988 [1993]; Farias 1987 [1989]; Sluga 1993; Pöggeler 1990; Young 1997; Faye 2005 [2009]; Sheehan 2015a). Nowhere has the debate over the scandal of Heidegger’s National Socialism been more heated than in France—perhaps owing to the depth and breadth of influence that Heidegger had on French philosophy (see Janicaud 2001 [2015]).

At one end of the spectrum, Young, maintains that Heidegger’s philosophical works can be fully ‘de-Nazified’—that Heidegger’s philosophical thought does not “stand in any essential connection to Nazism” (Young 1997: 5). Moreover, Young argues, “one may accept any of Heidegger’s philosophy, and … preserve, without inconsistency, a commitment to orthodox liberal democracy” (Young 1997: 5).

At the other extreme, Faye argues that it is “impossible to dissociate [Heidegger’s work in its entirety] from his political commitments”, and that Heidegger “dedicated himself” to “the introduction into philosophy of the very content of Nazism and Hitlerism” (Faye 2005 [2009: 7]). Indeed, Faye goes so far as to contend that “Heidegger’s work is not at all a ‘philosophy’”, that in his work “the very principles of philosophy are abolished” (Faye 2005 [2009: 4 & 316]).

Claims that Heidegger’s work is not philosophical or “destructive of philosophy” are belied by the fecundity of his thought for ongoing philosophical research in a variety of fields (including the phenomenology of perception and action, the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of artificial intelligence and cognitive science, ontology, the philosophy of time, the philosophy of art, the history of philosophy, and moral psychology).

At the same time, the suspicions raised by Heidegger’s Nazi past (and by his efforts to conceal that past) are too important to be ignored by scholars and students of his work. There can be little doubt that much of his work during the Nazi-era bears unmistakable resonances and affinities with Nazi ideology. National Socialism’s glorification of traditional rural German life, and its rhetorical anti-modernism and anti-cosmopolitanism finds echoes in Heidegger’s critique of technology (seesection 5.2). Nazi rhetoric of renewal and rebirth resonated with Heidegger growing conviction that Western metaphysics had run its course, that another beginning was needed (seesupplement: Heidegger and the Other Beginning). Indeed, Heidegger repeatedly rationalized his initial attraction to the Nazi party on just this basis (see GA95: 407; GA16: 430; GA16: 374).

As many scholars have noted, Heidegger’s embrace of National Socialism was tied up with his critique of technology. Habermas claims, for instance, that “In 1935 Heidegger still saw the inner truth and greatness of the National Socialist movement in the ‘encounter between global technology and modern man’” (Habermas 1985 [1987: 159]). Heidegger eventually came to view National Socialism as a “consummate form of modernity”, the “triumph of machination” (GA96: 127). And that made National Socialism something that itself needed to be overcome in the transition to a non-metaphysical form of dwelling (see Habermas 1985 [1987: 159–60]). But decades later, Heidegger continued to hold that “National Socialism did indeed go in the direction” of “attaining an adequate relationship to the essence of technology” (GA16: 677).

Perhaps the most significant and clearest point of affinity between Nazi ideology and Heidegger’s writings during the Nazi era centers on the völkisch ethno-nationalism that Heidegger incorporated into his account of the history of being in the 1930s. Consistently throughout his career, Heidegger was an anti-individualist about meaning—that is, he argued that the primary disclosure of being is social in character. In Being and Time, it is “the anyone-self” who “articulates the referential context of significance” in terms of which entities are encountered (SZ 129), and “prescribes that way of interpreting the world and being-in-the-world” (SZ 129). After the war, it is neighborhoods and localities of mortals who disclose the sense of things by dwelling together while gathered by the fourfold. But for a time in the 1930s Heidegger argues that the disclosive “we-self” is a people (Volk) that shares a history, a soil, blood, a language, tasks, possibilities, moods, and a destiny. Like the Nazis, Heidegger held a racist and anti-Semitic conception of the essence of the German people, although he rejected the Nazi’s biologistic conception of race. Like other völkisch nationalists of the time, Heidegger was convinced that the German people had a special destiny in saving Western civilization. But for Heidegger, unlike the Nazis, the leading role for the German people to play was that of overcoming metaphysics and inaugurating a new history of being.

Heidegger’s arguments in favor of an ethno-nationalist account of the disclosure of being are, however, unconvincing. One can grant the communal character of human existence, accept that we are essentially historical beings, and agree with an anti-individualist account of the disclosure of being—all without tying that disclosure to a particular ethnic group, people, nation, or state. Heidegger arguments for a völkisch nationalism in his lecture courses were sketchy at best. And already in the 1940s, Heidegger came to view the ethno-nationalist conception of a people (das Völkische) as a product of the subjectivity of modern metaphysics (see, e.g., GA5: 111, GA54: 204).

At the same time, we should remain alive to the fact that Heidegger’s account of the history of being, his critique of technology, and his essay on the world-disclosive significance of works of art, all came out of this period of Heidegger’s adventures in ethno-nationalism. It would be irresponsible to not sensitize ourselves to the question whether Heidegger’s nationalist and racist views have affected or distorted his understanding of history (including his critique of the technological age).

4. The “Turning” and Heidegger’s Later Thought

Much of Heidegger’s work, early and late, turns on exploring our role in disclosing being. In Being and Time, for instance, Heidegger maintains that entities depend on being, while being depends on us:

only as long as Dasein is (that is, only as long as an understanding of being is ontically possible), “is there” being(“gibt es” Sein). (SZ 212)

After Being and Time, Heidegger writes of a “turn” (Kehre) that, as Braver explains, refers either to “a reversal of perspective, turning from Dasein’s being to being itself”, or to “a fundamental change in being’s relation to us” (Braver 2021: 783). After the turn, Richardson notes, Heidegger comes to hold that

being is not something we accomplish ourselves; it doesn’t issue from an act of projection in the strong sense of Being and Time. And this is the element of realism in the original Greek viewpoint: the clearing happens by our receiving being, not creating it. (J. Richardson 2012: 219)

Even if we do not create being, so that it enjoys a certain independence from us, Heidegger nevertheless continues to hold that there is a sense in which being needs or uses us. Being needs us to give it a setting within which it can prevail. It needs us to “shelter” it, to stabilize it in entities. It needs us to “build” a “place” where a particular style of being can manifest itself (see, e.g., GA11: 117).

This “turn” as a shift with regard to questions of ontological dependence corresponds to a change in Heidegger’s prose style and his approach to philosophical argumentation. Consequently, amongst scholars “‘the turn’ or ‘the turning’ has also accrued the meaning of a change that took place in Heidegger’s writing and thinking” (Braver 2021: 783). As Braver explains, however, “scholars disagree about the precise timing, nature, extent, and even existence of this turn in his work, but talk of an early Heidegger and a late one remains fairly standard” (Braver 2021: 783).

There is also disagreement on how discontinuous Heidegger’s work “post-turn” is with his “pre-turn” thought. Withy, for instance, adopts as a basic interpretive commitment that there is “a robust continuity in Heidegger's thought from early to late” (Withy 2022: 4). Keiling, on the other hand, argues that this type of

turn-narrative presents Heidegger’s philosophy as evolving in a fundamentally continuous and coherent fashion, and therefore it covers over rather than explains the numerous philosophical difficulties and inconsistences Heidegger came to see in [_Being and Time_]. (Keiling 2025: 248)

Despite the inconsistencies, there are a number of ways in which Heidegger’s work is continuous across the so-called turn. For one thing, Heidegger across his entire career is interested in understanding the interplay between unconcealment and concealment (see Withy 2022).

Another enduring continuity in Heidegger’s thought is his adherence to a fundamentally relationalist account of being. In_Being and Time_, entities are holistically constituted by their relations—actual and possible, diachronic and synchronic, causal and logical and motivational—to other entities, activities, aims, and the unfolding of events. Being determines entities as entities by providing a background against which certain relations can show up as determinative for the intelligibility of those entities.

Heidegger’s later thought on the unconcealment of being develops and expands this relationalist account of being by arguing that being has a history, and that this history is made up of a sequence of fundamentally different styles for determining which relations are ontologically basic. As Markus Gabriel explains,

For Heidegger, the world is, as it were, a question of style: the world of the Aztecs and the world of French monarchy differ in style; they are different worlds in that they are different overall ways of making sense of how things are. (Gabriel 2015: 196–7)

In the process, the later Heidegger sets into motion a whole set of concepts that are traditionally thought of as static: being undergoes transformations; essences are not fixed, but they happen—an essence essences (das Wesen west); worlds as whole coherent settings for human existence arise, endure for a while, and then collapse—a world worlds (die Welt weltet). And all of this motion is governed by the “gentle law” of adaptation (Ereignis).

Thus, after the “turning”, Heidegger is increasingly interested in tracing out the succession of different styles or understandings of being that make up a history of being. This seems to be a fundamentally different approach to history than the deconstruction of the history of philosophy that Heidegger attempted in the years following the publication of Being and Time. But even here, one can find continuities between Heidegger’s thought in Being and Time, and in the later works. Bernhard Stiegler has argued, for instance, that Heidegger’s later thought must be

understood on … two levels at once: on the first, the existential structure of Dasein, as a relation to time determined by_intratemporality;_ on the second, as the destiny of the Western history of being through the “metaphysical” history of philosophy in which being is determined as presence and is characterized by a “vulgar” understanding of time in terms of the now of intratemporality. (Stiegler 1994 [1998: 4])

Nevertheless, as Zarader argues, the turn to history is driven by a recognition that the analytic of Dasein is not an adequate foundation for ontology. This is because being necessarily is forgotten or withdrawn, and thus

it is no longer a question of reaching being from the entity in which it gives itself (Dasein); it is a question of thinking being from the history in which it withdraws. (Zarader 1986: 77)

Heidegger explains the dynamic emergence of new styles of being by invoking the notion of a clearing. As Wrathall explains,

a new understanding of being can establish itself, and a new ordering of beings can become operative, only if there is something like a clearing that conceals any other way of experiencing the world in order to allow this particular way to come to the forefront. (Wrathall 2011: 33)

The clearing, Heidegger insists, is not an “indeterminate emptiness into which something ‘appears’” (GA69:123). Rather, it is a very specific way of withholding some possibilities of being so that the remaining possibilities of being show up as the self-evident and natural way for entities to be. In this way, a particular style or mode of being can prevail. But to experience the prevailing possibilities of being as natural and determinative for us, we cannot be aware that a clearing away of alternate possibilities is going on. Thus, a clearing not only keeps back other possibilities, it also keeps back that it is keeping back other possibilities: it is not “the mere clearing of presence, but the clearing of presence concealing itself, the clearing of a self-concealing sheltering” (GA14: 88).

Another mark of the “turning” in Heidegger’s thought is an increased attention to the role that artworks and poetry play in disclosing being. In his essay on “The Origin of the Work of Art”, Heidegger argues that “great” works of art have a privileged part to play in establishing a new world within the clearing. When great past works of art attracted enough “preservers”, “a new and essential world irrupted” (GA5: 65 / OTBT 48 / PLT 74). For a detailed discussion of Heidegger’s “post-aesthetic thinking about art”, see Thomson 2011: 41).

By presenting us with a shining and attractive exemplar of a new style of being, a work can change the way we experience what things really are and which aims and purposes are truly important (GA5: 60 / OTBT 45 / PLT 70; see Dreyfus & Kelly 2011: 83). Drawing on Hölderlin, Heidegger connects the poetic revelation of shining things to a festival or holiday. “In the festive mode (mood)”, Young explains,

[w]e step into wonder and adoration of the things that there are, into gratitude for the fact that they are and that we are among them…. [T]hings show up as belonging to a sacred order and since they themselves share in this sacredness, command of us love and respect. (Young 2001: 88)

Yet another mark of the “turning” in Heidegger’s thought is his turn to language as a “a world-forming power” that “first preforms the being of entities in advance and brings them into a structure” (GA38A: 168). In_Being and Time_, Heidegger clearly viewed language as derivative of a pre-linguistic articulation of the world (seesection 2.2.3.3). In the years after the publication of _Being and Time,_however, Heidegger argued for an essential interdependence between being and what he called “originary language”. By 1932, for instance, he held that “where there is no language, there is no understanding of being” (GA35: 180). After the “turning”, Charles Taylor has argued, Heidegger develops a constitutivist theory of language: “language enters into or makes possible a whole range of crucially human feelings, activities, relations”, and thus “bursts the framework of pre-linguistic life forms” (Taylor 2005: 437; seesupplement: Heidegger on language).

Perhaps the most obscure aspect of Heidegger’s later work was his effort to understand what moves or constitutes the sequence of historical epochs of being. Heidegger pursues such themes in the form of repeated meditations on Ereignis. Ereignis in colloquial German means an event or an occurrence, but Heidegger goes to great lengths to insist that the Ereignis that governs the unconcealment of being is not to be thought of as something that happens in the ordinary sense. A variety of other translations have been proposed for Ereignis, including ‘appropriation’, ‘event of appropriation’, ‘coming into view’, and ‘adaptation’ (see Wrathall 2021b for a discussion of the merits of these various translations). For Heidegger, the root verb_eignen_—“to be adapted or suited”—is a key to seeing that Ereignis names a tendency toward adaptation, a tendency toward drawing things into a state of mutual fittedness or “co-belonging” (see Dastur 1990). Dastur explains:

Ereignis, by making the unfolding of the being of the human being as Da-sein visible in the clearing, brings mortals to their own by making them appropriate (vereignen) to being which, for its part, is suited (zugeeignet), that is to say, dedicated to the being of the human being. (Dastur 1990: 111)

In thinking beyng, language, the clearing, and the history of being in terms of adaptation, Heidegger holds that the essential relations—the relations that define the essence of something—are relationships of mutual fittedness. What an entity_is_, in other words, is a function of that for which it is adapted (eignet) or suitable (geeignet). The clearing that lets particular relations stand forth as definitive “is never the effect of a cause nor the consequence of a reason” (GA12: 247 / OWL 127). It is, instead, “produced” or “brought forth” by adaptation (see GA12: 246–7 / OWL 127–8). Adaptation thus can have the sense of both a condition of suitedness or aptness or fittingness, and a process that leads toward that condition of aptness. In the latter sense, Heidegger argues that adaptation is the prevailing tendency that governs the history of being. World-historical epochs change when our most basic practices are disrupted, leading to a process of reorienting ourselves to the relationships that are definitive of our world.

5. The History of Being

Heidegger argues that ordinary history—the history of wars, of the rise and decline of nations, of scientific advances and discoveries, of changing artistic and cultural styles, of varying philosophical systems and doctrines—is shaped by a history of being. The history of being is a history of fundamental changes in the way entities manifest themselves. In each historical age or epoch, being has a different character or style: “‘being’ and ‘being’ respectively say something different in the different epochs of its destiny” (GA10: 91). Human practices, possibilities, and norms are profoundly shaped by the way that entities are manifest in each epoch.[78] Because the style of being is so fundamental in shaping the form of life that prevails in an age, and because we do not determine the style so much as receive it, Heidegger refers to the style of being as a “fate” or a “destiny” (Geschick) or a “sending” (Schicken). “The definition of History as Geschick, destiny in the sense of_Schickung_, destination, the sending of being”, Michel Haar explains,

is simply the recognition of the omnipotence of th[e] inaugural past …. History is completed not only at its end but at its commencement, in that it governs all that arises from it. (Haar 1987 [1993: 69–70])

Some critics of Heidegger, most notably Richard Rorty, have charged that Heidegger’s talk of a history of being is vacuous, because he does not validate his account of history through references to ordinary historical events (Rorty 1982, 48). But, as Okrent notes, while the history of being is “correlated with ordinary history”, it is “not … simply a function of ordinary history” (Okrent 2020: 292). And Heidegger does offer some, admittedly sparse but nonetheless significant, indications of the connection between the background understanding of being and the foreground appearances that characterize the age.[79]

For the most part, however, Heidegger looks primarily to the history of philosophy as the foundation for his account of the history of being. This is because Heidegger holds that the doctrines of great thinkers express, more directly and clearly than ordinary events, the sense of being that sustains their world.[80]

There are three main periods to consider in Heidegger’s account of the history of being.

The first period is the pre-metaphysical world of the pre-Socratic Greeks. Heidegger refers to this as the “first beginning” of Western thinking, because it fixes the trajectory of the metaphysical epochs that follow. But, Heidegger insists, thinkers like Anaximander, Heraclitus, and Parmenides are not themselves metaphysical—they are “pre-metaphysical” or “not-yet-metaphysical” (GA48: 334). On Heidegger’s reading, pre-Socratic thought is “on the way to metaphysics”, because it is concerned with the search for a unified prōtē archē (GA55: 258, see Thomson 2005: 31). Philosophy emerges in the first beginning as responding to a change in the background practices of the early Greek world—namely, the emergence of a uniform style of being out of a previously polytheist or pluralist understanding of what things are and how they should be. Pre-Socratic thought is, however, “not yet metaphysical” because thinkers like Anaximander, Heraclitus, and Parmenides experienced being as unconcealment, or as emergence into manifestness (GA 48: 334; see Wrathall & Lambeth 2011). Metaphysics, in contrast to the pre-Socratics, is oblivious to the dynamics of unconcealment.

The second period begins with the transition to metaphysics in the “thinking of Plato and Aristotle”, and their “first determination of the being of beings” (GA15: 378 / FS 68). “From here on out”, Heidegger claims, “the entire history of metaphysics is ordered as a succession of the various fundamental forms of the being of entities” (GA15: 378–9 / FS 68). This sequence of metaphysical epochs has reached its consummation in the technological world.

The third and future period will only arise with the overcoming of metaphysics and an “other beginning” of history—a beginning that must necessarily take the form of a retrieval of paths of thought that were incipient already in the first beginning, but not taken (see, e.g., GA65: 504;supplement: Heidegger and the Other Beginning).

5.1 Metaphysics

The word “metaphysics” usually refers to a division of academic philosophy alongside other branches of the discipline, such as epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, etc. Used this way, “metaphysics” names the branch of philosophy that inquires into being, that is, into the first principles and the constitutive categories of entities.[81]

When Heidegger uses the word “metaphysics” in his later thought, however, he is rarely talking about a branch of philosophy. He instead means one of two things. First, a “metaphysic” is a universal and all-encompassing style of structuring the relations that define entities “as such and as a whole”. This for Heidegger is the core meaning of the word “metaphysics” (see GA43: 288). “Humanity does not ‘have’ a ‘metaphysic’”, Heidegger explains; rather, we exist “in the realm of a truth about entities as such and as a whole, and that means that humanity is in the sphere of control of a metaphysic” (GA76: 125).

Heidegger also uses the word “metaphysics” to refer to_a way of thinking_ that grows out of and expresses or represents a metaphysic in the previous sense. Philosophers can be metaphysicians in this sense even when they are writing about ethics, epistemology, aesthetics, etc.—provided that their views on the latter subjects grow out of and express the prevailing metaphysic (i.e., the prevailing, universal style of being; see, e.g., GA6.2: 104 / N4 78 & GA55: 252). Plato, Aquinas, Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche are amongst the most important “metaphysical thinkers” in Heidegger’s estimation. This is because their works express in the clearest way possible a particular historico-ontological style.[82]

Consequently, when Heidegger writes about the history of metaphysics, he is not referring to a sequence of doctrines or theories of being. The history of metaphysics is primarily the history of the sequence of distinct ways that entities show up as entities. As Heidegger sometimes puts it, “metaphysics is the history of the [various] imprintings of being (Seinsprägungen)” (GA14 / OTB 41).

Each metaphysical world has a coherent background sensibility for what makes sense, what goals are worth pursuing, how entities are organized, how actions are justified, what things are certain, and what things are open to doubt. This background sensibility is embodied in the organized contexts of equipment, activities, social roles, and purposive ends that characterize a given age.

The primary feature of a metaphysic, then, is the existence of a_uniform ontological style_. When Heidegger claims that “metaphysics begins covertly with the beginning of western thinking” (GA66: 383), he means that, coincident with the origins of western philosophy, all entities started to show up as bearing a shared, all-encompassing ontological character. Corresponding to this, human activities manifested a coherent “style of being-there” (GA65: 34). The history of these metaphysical epochs has a direction to it. As Richardson puts it, “the overall tendency of being’s history is … the most thorough control: things are, as they are when they are subject to this fullest control” (J. Richardson 2012: 233). Thus, each new metaphysic aims at improving our ability to anticipate and plan and control the unfolding of events, culminating in the technological age.

When it comes to metaphysics in the “derived” sense of a “particular doctrinal presentation” of the prevailing metaphysic,[83] Heidegger identifies several characteristics. First, a mark of a metaphysical understanding of being is what Heidegger calls the “_priority of entities over being_” (GA66: 88). Metaphysical thinkers arrive at a conception of being by abstracting from entities their most general characteristic. When being is understood as a property abstracted from existing entities, Heidegger calls it “beingness”. Being as “beingness” is the most universal property possessed by entities, one shared by everything that is. But because beingness is abstracted from the style of being prevailing in the current epoch, any given metaphysical thinker grasps only one style of the manifestation of entities: “each metaphysic is based on a fundamental experience of entities, which is peculiar to each thinker” (GA15: 313 / FS 26). Consequently, what metaphysical thinkers miss is the dynamic character of “beyng”[84], which “absolutely evades being grasped on the basis of entities” (GA51: 60).

A second characteristic of a metaphysical doctrine is that “beingness is understood as constant presence” (GA31: 61). In other words, “an entity is what shows itself in constancy and presence” (GA65: 191).[85] As Richardson explains, an entity is present when we achieve a “close firm grip” on it (J. Richardson 2012: 219). So to treat being as presence is to define the being of an entity in terms of those properties which allow us to achieve such a grip. For Plato, for instance, we get our best grip on entities when we understand the forms, which are the unchanging source of the intelligibility of the world; to be is to instantiate a form. In modernity we get our best grip on entities when they “surrender to representation and production” (GA95: 236). So to be in the modern world is to be representable and producible/manipulable. And in the technological age, entities are most present when we can set them on call so that they are readily available for consumption and use (see, e.g., GA79: 40, 46). So to be in the technological world is to be an orderable resource.

Some commentators take Heidegger as himself endorsing the claim that being is presence (see, e.g., Olafson 1987; Blattner 1999: 289). Carman argues persuasively, however, that

the interpretation of being as presence was precisely the misunderstanding that Heidegger initially sought to correct and overcome, but which he subsequently regarded as the fundamental interpretive turn in the constitution of the metaphysical tradition. (Carman 1995, 451; see GA8: 142 / WCT 236)

For Derrida, however, Heidegger’s continual reliance on the notion of presence in his account of the history of being shows that, despite his best efforts, Heidegger himself “remains within the metaphysics of presence” (Derrida 1972 [1982: 65]).

A third characteristic of a metaphysical understanding of being is its_oblivion to emergence_. Because entities show up as simply what there is, inhabitants of a metaphysical world take the prevailing style of being as something necessary. In metaphysics, there is no recognition of the contingency of the prevailing style of being.[86] Nor is there a recognition of our role in disclosing being. As Young puts it, “the crucial truth metaphysics misses is the dependence of being on human being” (Young 2002: 27).

A fourth mark of a metaphysical understanding of being is its_cognitivism_—i.e., it takes it for granted that what entities truly are is capturable or specifiable through concepts, graspable in abstract thought, and expressible in propositional language. Metaphysics, as Heidegger puts it, thinks of truth “in the already derivative form of the truth of cognitive knowledge and the truth of propositions that formulate such knowledge” (GA9: 370).

Heidegger argues that the history of the West from Plato to the present has been punctuated by a sequence of four or five distinct epochs, each with its own overarching ontological style. These include the Greek, the Roman, Christendom, the Modern, and the Technological epoch.[87] For a more detailed discussion of these distinct epochs in the history of being, see Wrathall 2021e; Thomson 2011b: 107–8; Carman 2019: 153.

Heidegger’s preoccupation with the history of metaphysics is primarily driven by the need to understand our current technological epoch. So we will focus here on the “final stage” in the history of being—the technological age.[88]

5.2 Technology

For Heidegger, the proliferation of technological devices is a superficial phenomenon which conceals an underlying change in the understanding of being. “In all technological happenings”, Heidegger argues, “a sense rules, a sense which lays claim to human actions and omissions, and which was not first invented and made by human beings” (GA16: 526 / DT 55). The “sense” which “claims us” in the technological age—what it ultimately makes sense to do—is to order all things, and to place them at our disposal in a maximally flexible way, so that we can smoothly and reliably pursue whatever aim we happen to fix on in any given moment. This sense prevails, Heidegger argues, because of a fundamental change in the way entities are disclosed.

5.2.1 The Technological Mode of Revealing

In analyzing the technological “way of revealing”, Heidegger focuses on (a) the fundamental mood or attunement that prevails in the technological world; (b) the basic characteristic of entities—the way in which they “presence” or offer themselves to our grasp; and (c) the way in which entities are gathered and organized into a_whole_.

The mood of the technological age is a mood of profound boredom (for a critical review of this claim, see Beistegui 2003: 68ff). When we are attuned to entities by boredom, they matter to us only to the degree that they relieve this boredom by offering us a temporary diversion.[89]

Heidegger’s name for the basic ontological_characteristic_ of entities (including us humans) in the technological age is Bestand, often translated as “resource” but perhaps best translated as “stock”—as when we speak of the “stock” of replaceable parts that are held in an inventory. When something is “in stock”, it is on hand and available for selection. Stock pieces are defined by their replaceability and mutual substitutability (see GA79: 36–37).

Resources or stock pieces are gathered or organized, as a unified_whole_, in what Heidegger calls das Gestell (he sometimes hyphenates it as: Ge-Stell). The root verb_stellen_ means to set in place, supply, or_posit._ When Heidegger appropriates the word as an ontological term, he explains that he takes the prefix Ge- as expressing “the gathering, the unification, the bringing together of all modes of supplying or positing” (GA15: 366 / FS 60). And “the sense of positing is here that of that of a challenging-forth”—i.e., that of compelling or forcing the natural world to “yield” to the demands of the technological order (GA15: 366 / FS 60). Perhaps unsurprisingly, ‘_Gestell_’ has proven to be a difficult word to translate. For many years, the default translation has been “enframing”—capturing the idea that in the technological age, entities are set within an exploitative framework. More recently, Kisiel has argued that it should be translated as “syn-thetic com-posit(ion)ing”, explaining that “the Greek-rooted adjective ‘synthetic’ adds the note of artifactuality and even artificiality to the synthesis of positions and posits” (Kisiel 2021: 710). Wrathall has opted for “inventory”, to capture the core notion that, in technology, entities are “collected” and “reconfigured” so that they can be “stored or placed in such a manner that they are on call and available to be used, combined, and reconfigured in whatever way we see fit” (Wrathall 2021g: 434). But the basic idea is that technology discovers what entities are by compelling them to take a form that allows everything to be gathered and ordered and set on call in a way that maximizes their ready usability

In order to provide us with endless diversions, then, technological calculation seeks out everything’s maximum uses (i.e., it presents us with a maximal variety of different possible options) at the minimum expense (where minimum expense means that choosing to do one thing now does not constrain or restrict the range of options we have in the future) (GA7: 19 / QCT 15).

According to Heidegger, Hegel and Nietzsche are each, in different ways, the thinkers who articulate what is happening with being in the technological age. Hegel’s “absolute reason in the absolute metaphysics of subjectivity” is “essentially the same thing” as modern technology (GA98: 58). This is because Hegel’s project is “almost literally the attempt to_make_ the world our own” (Pippin 2024: 68). With its emphasis on a self-conscious remaking of the world, Hegel’s thought obscures the need to foster a receptivity to things as having weight, or mattering to us, independently of our immediate projects.

It is in Nietzsche’s thought of the will to power and the eternal recurrence of the same, however, that Heidegger thinks we can most clearly discern the key ontological features of the technological age. Heidegger interprets these doctrines as expressing an experience in which everything we encounter

shows up as inviting us to rearrange it, reorder it, incorporate it into new practices and relationships…. We find ourselves constantly returned to a situation where we are free to rearrange and reestablish our own interpretation of the world. (Wrathall 2011: 232)[90]

5.2.2 The Danger of Technology

Heidegger regards the technological mode of revealing entities as “the supreme danger” to humanity (GA7: 31 / QCT 26). There is some variation in the scholarly accounts of how precisely to understand technological mode of revealing and the danger that it poses.

For Dreyfus, the essence of technology is found in the technological preoccupation with flexibility and efficiency: “what our culture is dedicated to and is good at”, Dreyfus argues, is “flexibility and efficiency, not for the sake of some further end, but just for the sake of flexibility and efficiency themselves” (Dreyfus 2017: 184). But the imperative to maximize flexibility and efficiency drives out things and practices that resist efficient and flexible ordering—for instance, friendship, or enjoying the sublime wonders of nature. Inefficient practices get increasingly marginalized, or altered beyond recognition as they are reinterpreted in a technological fashion. Friendship becomes networking; “nature becomes one gigantic petrol station, a source of energy for modern technology and industry” (GA16: 523 / DT 50). As technology obliterates or reappropriates all marginal practices, the danger is that it will block us from realizing our essence as “receivers of understandings of being” (Dreyfus 2017: 192)—after all, on Dreyfus’s account, these marginal practices are the seedbed of the emergence of a new style of being. Along similar lines, Haar argues that “_the_danger” is found in the way technology

threatens the relation of man to being…. Man has the vocation of ‘watching over the essence of truth…. A human being fully adapted to the technological world would no longer be human, for being would no longer be for him worthy of questioning. (Haar 1987 [1993: 86–7])

Thomson puts “calculative thinking” at the core of his account of the technological style. Calculative thinking

quantifies all qualitative relations, reducing entities to bivalent, programmable ‘information’, digitized data ready to enter into ‘a state of pure circulation’ on the internet. (Thomson 2005: 56)

In denying that entities are defined by their qualitative differences, the “progressive technologization of intelligibility” effects “an ontologically reductive transformation of all entities into intrinsically meaningless resources on standby for optimization” (Thomson 2005: 75). Along similar lines, Pippin emphasizes the “complex denial of … meaningfulness” or significance that the technological understanding brings:

[b]eing as standing reserve, mere material for technological manipulation or a kind of meaninglessness, has emerged as its significance. (Pippin 2024: 49)

On Wrathall’s account, the technological style drives toward an organization of the world that can serve any conceivable aim or purpose at any given moment.[91] This is experienced as a kind of liberation—we are free at any moment to revisit our choices by pursuing an alternative goal or ideal. No consequences are enduring, and prior decisions do not constrain future action. In this way, technology discloses everything as a mere option. An option is something that can, but need not be, chosen. Choosing an option involves no enduring genuine commitment to what is chosen. After the choice of one option, we are free to revisit the choice later and substitute another option for the one first selected. But the danger implicit in the optionalization of everything is that everything is reduced to having merely instrumental significance. Nothing shows up as having an importance that transcends our current passing whims (see Wrathall 2019).

Heidegger’s account of technology has often been criticized for being too abstract and theoretical, and thus detached from the realities of actual technological systems. Feenberg charges that Heidegger’s account is unrealistically essentialist in the sense that it “holds that there is one and only one ‘essence’ of technology and it is responsible for the chief problems of modern civilization” (Feenberg 1999: 3). Heidegger’s essentialism, Belu and Feenberg also argue, inclines Heidegger toward a “totalising” view that leads to fatalism in the face of technology (Belu & Feenberg 2010).

For defenders of Heidegger’s account, the fatalism critique exhibits a kind of dichotomous thinking about ontology that Heidegger rejects. It assumes that either an understanding of being is something in our power to change, or that we are absolutely powerless to even recognize it, let alone escape it. While Heidegger does hold that it is not within our power directly to change the prevailing understanding of being, this does not mean we are powerless in the face of technology. Commentators like Dreyfus, Thomson, and Wrathall argue that, as we change our background practices, the possibilities open to us will shift accordingly.[92] Much of Heidegger’s later thought is “preparatory” in the sense of attempting to prepare the ground for to foster practices that will disclose a new understanding of being.

Metaphysics, Heidegger insists, reaches its final and consummate form in the technological age.[93] There will be no new, all-encompassing ontological styles. The reason for thinking that the technological age is the final metaphysical epoch seems to lie in technology’s ability to incorporate and “enhance” any practice. In other words, there is no emerging practice that can lead us beyond a technological ordering, because any good we might decide to pursue can be set up, commodified, and offered as an option made available through technology.[94] The only path out of technology requires us first to be reattuned in such a way that we do not will for ourselves the unlimited freedom of aimless consumption.

5.3 Beyond Metaphysics

Much of Heidegger’s later work is concerned with envisioning pathways toward overcoming metaphysics. What these paths have in common is their recognition of “the need for a more ‘receptive’ stance towards being” (J. Richardson 2012: 212). In particular, they are designed to reawaken

the experience of something sacred—of something capable of making demands on us, of calling us to act for ends higher than the satisfaction of our passing whims. (Wrathall & Lambeth 2011: 173)

Thus, Heidegger’s hope for an “other” beginning is the hope for a new ethos—a non-metaphysical form of life that involves taking part in the disclosure of a particular style of life that is shaped by one’s locale. Already in Being and Time, Heidegger had emphasized that human beings are essentially being-in-the-world, and that means that we only are who we are because we are involved with our world. In his later work, this thought develops into the claim that, as Malpas puts it, human being is “intimately tied to place” (Malpas 2012: 67). “To be a human being” Heidegger explains in his later work, “means to dwell” (GA7: 149 / PLT 145) And to dwell_well_ is to dwell “poetically”. Poetic dwelling recognizes that, as Young explains,

our world is not a human achievement but is rather “gifted” to us in the “adaptation” (Ereignis) of beyng….In a state of spiritual health, we experience a deep and festive “gratitude” (das Danken; GA52: 197)) for the “favor” (die Gunst) that has been bestowed on us (GA9: 310/326), for “the wonder that around us a world worlds, that there is something rather than nothing, that there are things and we ourselves are in their midst (GA52:64)”. (Young 2021: 257)

In addition, poetic dwelling involves participation in conserving (Schonen) the place wherein we are at home.[95]

Drawing on his reading of Hölderlin, Heidegger identifies four dimensions of the local place that sustains human poetic dwelling.[96] He refers to these four dimensions collectively as “the fourfold”. They include the earth, the sky,mortals, and the_divinities_.[97] The local character of the locale is a function of the particular character of the earth, sky, mortal practices, and divinities in that place. As Rorty explains, the fourfold

offer[s] a relationalist, contextualist account of things. In this account, things are what they are by virtue of their relation to everything else. This means that they have different features depending on the context in which they are put. (Rorty 2005: 274)

Heidegger’s relationalist account of the fourfold, Rorty concludes, offers

an attractive alternative to the substantialism that we inherit from Aristotle—the doctrine that relations to other objects are mere accidents, which leave unchanged the essence of the self-contained, autonomous object. (Rorty 2005: 274; compare Mitchell 2015: 3)

For a more detailed account of Heidegger’s “other beginning”, seesupplement: Heidegger and the Other Beginning.