Hi. I read some of Heidegger’s Being and Time when I was around twenty, not realising that it was only the first third of a much larger projected volume. His essentially existential approach to gaining a theoretical grasp of ‘Being’ left me cold. This is because even then I didn’t think there was an existential approach possible, since, by definition ‘Being’ by itself is beyond actual existence.
Or at least by my definition, which was fuelled (at the time) by the sort of thing Plato said about it, and some of the statements by the presocratics. We might imagine that it exists, as all things must do, somewhere in space and in time. This Plato said was an illegitimate way of thinking about ‘the one true thing’. By its nature it cannot have its reality and nature in space and time.
Heidegger is aware of this of course, but nevertheless deflects from the consideration of Being as Being (the presocratics Aristotle described as the first philosophers to consider the question of Being qua Being). He looks leftwards again and again at existential and phenomenological approaches to questions of Being.
In the end, he argues, in a manner similar to Sartre later on when talking about meaning (in Existentialism & Humanism, which is the slightly inaccurate title his book is given in Britain), that existential experience, however imprecise and however poor it is as a process, is the way in which to gain an understanding of what is difficult to apprehend.
In short, for me, Heidegger is not actually talking about Being at all, but the Being of living beings, and occasionally looking upwards at more abstracted and transcendent conceptions of what Being itself might be, though it is an unattainable concept.
Heidegger was a pupil of Edmund Husserl, who has been a major influence on me, also, though it a different way. Many of my essays on subjects start off from one place, and end up in another. Occasionally I follow the line of an established author or authors, and as the essay goes on, I start to deconstruct the elements which hold their argument together. After that, I may entirely reverse the premises of their argument, and go off in another direction. I was doing this before I had my close encounter with Husserl, but learning to see all information as elements which might be capable of being read and constructed in entirely different ways, and breaking down conventional narratives into their components, was a key part of my intellectual development.
I also had the advantage of having read widely in philosophy and ancient literature before I began formal study of the ancient world. So there was much more going on in my head than a direct interaction with texts as themselves. There were always other possible contexts, and other ways of understanding what their actual concerns might have been (this widened to an interest in iconography and ritual texts – no one treats the latter seriously (in their own terms), outside of a purely anthropological interest. Wittgenstein thought this was a foolish approach by the anthropologists).
One of the first things which set me on my current path was noticing (as I’ve mentioned elsewhere), that some equivalent technical terms in ancient Egypt were used in the same way as Aristotle did. But the Egyptian evidence was nearly a thousand years older (the concept of ‘completion’ for example). So it occurred to me that both the established history of philosophy (i.e., invented by the Greeks in the 5th century BCE), and that the idea that philosophy was the successor to religious thought (considered scarcely rational), might be components in a false narrative. So I started to move the building blocks of the conventional narratives around, to see if they made more sense when looked at from a different point of view.
I’ve mentioned Aristotle referring to the presocratics as the first philosophers to consider Being as Being, meaning in all the abstracted glory of the concept (Aristotle made an important distinction between the actual and the potential infinite, and the latter is still the basis of most mathematical work on the infinite. Why? It is hard to do mathematics and geometry with the actual infinite. The modern assumption is that nobody before the Greeks ever conceived of a direct engagement with the infinite (or with Being).
Yet the prosocratic concern with Being qua Being is in the wrong place. If it was in the right place, it would follow on from the kind of discussion we get from Plato and Aristotle, when contemplating various intellectual puzzles (the aporia). Yet there it is at the beginning of the Greek philosophical tradition. It is in fragments only, many of which were used by Aristotle in his Metaphysics. Could it be that these fragments were the product of a sophisticated discussion of philosophical questions in the Eleatic school and elsewhere, much earlier, and that such discussion has just dropped out of the record? Or perhaps was never committed to writing at all?
I know the answer to that question now, which is that the Greeks did indeed get their philosophical ideas from elsewhere, which is not to say that they did not do philosophy themselves before this (I’m in the process of writing up the evidence and case for the Greek close encounter with Ancient Assyria in the seventh century BCE.)
I’ve been reading an extensive paper on Heidegger, and his uncompleted project of Being and Time. The latter half of the proposed book was actually looking to a deconstruction (or even destruction) of the history (and modern understanding) of philosophy. That was a big surprise, since it is essentially what my overarching project is about. For me, it is largely a necessary task because the Enlightenment placing of the first sophisticated discussion of philosophical questions in Greece between the seventh to the fourth centuries BCE entirely obscures the relevance of philosophy to the history and development of religion, both in the ancient Near East, and in ancient Greece. That false narrative needs to be fixed.
I’ve beaten over a thousand words in about an hour, so I will break off here. If you are interested the essay (actually seminar notes) on Heidegger’s Being and Time is at: https://cpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com/campuspress.yale.edu/dist/8/1250/files/2016/01/Heidegger-Being-and-Time-1qtvjcq.pdf . By Karsten Harries, from 2014.
I’ll write about Parmenides and Heidegger’s discussion of Plato’s Sophist later.
Hope you have had a great start to the year!
Best, Thomas
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