The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics

World, Finitude, Solitude

Martin Heidegger

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 1996
• ISBN:
  9780253004406
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophical Metaphysics

Now in paperback!

".. an important addition to the translations of Heidegger's lecture-courses.. Heidegger's voice can be heard with few of the jolting Germanicisms with which so many translations of Heidegger's texts have been burdened...." —International Philosophical Quarterly

"The translators of these lectures have succeeded splendidly in giving readers an intimation of the tensely insistent tone of the original German. Heidegger's concern with a linguistic preconsciousness and with our entrancement before the enigma of existence remains intensely contemporary." —Choice

"There is much that is new and valuable in this book, and McNeill and Walker's faithful translation makes it very accessible." —Review of Metaphysics

"Whoever thought that Heidegger... has no surprises left in him had better read this volume. If its rhetoric is 'hard and heavy' its thought is even harder and essentially more daring than Heideggerians ever imagined Heidegger could be." —David Farrell Krell

First published in German in 1938 as volume 29/30 of Heidegger's collected works, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics includes an extended treatment of the history of metaphysics and an elaboration of a philosophy of life and nature. Heidegger's concepts of organism, animal behavior, and environment are uniquely developed and defined with intensity.

This work, the text of Martin Heidegger's lecture course of 1929/30, is crucial for an understanding of Heidegger's transition from the major work of his early years, Being and Time, to his later preoccupations with language, truth, and history. First published in German in 1983 as volume 29/30 of Heidegger's collected works, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics includes an extended treatment of the history of metaphysics and an elaboration of a philosophy of life and nature. Heidegger's concepts of organism, animal behavior, and environment are uniquely developed and defined with intensity.

PART ONE

Awakening a Fundamental Attunement in Our Philosophizing

Chapter One

The Task of Awakening a Fundamental Attunement and the Indication of a Concealed Fundamental Attunement in Our Contemporary Dasein

§16. Coming to a preliminary understanding about the significance of awakening a fundamental attunement.

a) Awakening: not ascertaining something at hand, but letting what is asleep become wakeful.

Our fundamental task now consists in awakening a fundamental attunement in our philosophizing. I deliberately say: in our philosophizing, not in some arbitrary philosophizing nor even in philosophy in itself, for there is no such thing. It is a matter of awakening a fundamental attunement which is to sustain our philosophizing, and not the fundamental attunement. Accordingly, there is not merely one single attunement, but several. Which one concerns us? From where are we to derive such an attunement? We are faced with a choice concerning which fundamental attunement to awaken here. Yet we are faced not only with this choice, but also with the much more difficult question of the path upon which we are to awaken this or that fundamental attunement in our philosophizing.

Attunements—are they not something we can least of all invent, something that comes over us, something that we cannot simply call up? Do they not form of their own accord, as something we cannot forcibly bring about, but into which we slip unawares? If so, then we cannot and may not forcibly bring about such an attunement artificially or arbitrarily, if we are going to allow it to be an attunement. It must already be there. All we can do is to ascertain it. Yet how are we to ascertain a fundamental attunement of philosophizing? Can an attunement be ascertained as generally at hand, can it be demonstrated as a universally admitted fact? Is attunement in general something we take note of as something at hand, just as we notice, for example, that some people are fair and others dark? Is attunement something that one simply has or does not have? Of course, people will say, attunement is perhaps something other than the colour of the hair and skin of human beings, yet something which nevertheless can be ascertained with regard to human beings. How else should we know about such attunements? Thus we will have to undertake a survey to give us the fundamental attunement we are seeking. Granted that this could be carried out, even merely within the circle of those present here and now—are we really so sure that those we ask are in each case in a position to inform us about how this fundamental attunement of their Dasein is there ‘in them’? Perhaps such a thing as the fundamental attunement we are seeking is precisely something that cannot be ascertained in this way by an inquiry. It could be that it pertains to ascertaining an attunement not merely that one has the attunement, but that one is attuned in accord with it.

We can see already that any so-called objective ascertaining of a fundamental attunement is a dubious, indeed impossible undertaking. Accordingly, it is also meaningless to ask in general about the pervasiveness and universality of attunement or to brood over the universal validity of something ascertained in this way. In other words, it is not necessarily an objection to our claim of a fundamental attunement being there in our Dasein if one of you, or even many, or all of you assure us that you are unable to ascertain such an attunement in yourselves when you observe yourselves. For in the end there is nothing at all to be found by observation—no matter how astute, even if it were to call upon psychoanalysis for help.

Thus we shall not speak at all of ‘ascertaining’ a fundamental attunement in our philosophizing, but of awakening it. Awakening means making something wakeful, letting whatever is sleeping become wakeful.

b) The being-there and not-being-there of attunement cannot be grasped via the distinction between consciousness and unconsciousness.

‘Whatever is sleeping’ is in a peculiar way absent and yet there. When we awaken an attunement, this means that it is already there. At the same time, it expresses the fact that in a certain way it is not there. This is strange: attunement is something that is simultaneously there and not there. If, in the customary manner, we now wished to continue philosophizing in a formal way, we could say straightaway: Something that is simultaneously there and not there has that kind of being which intrinsically contradicts itself. For being-there [Da-sein] and not-being-there [Nicht-Da-sein]¹ is a straightforward contradiction. Yet whatever is contradictory cannot be. It is—and this is an ancient proposition of traditional metaphysics—intrinsically impossible, just as a round square cannot be. We shall see that we must not only put in question this venerable principle of metaphysics, which is based on a quite specific conception of being, but also cause it to shatter in its very foundations.

After all, what we generally know about things, we know in terms of an unambiguous either/or. Things are either at hand or not at hand. Is this not valid for man also? Certainly—either someone is there or not there. Yet at the same time one must recall that the state of affairs here is quite different from the case of a stone. For we know from experience of ourselves as human beings that something can be at hand in us and yet not be, that there are processes that belong to us yet do not enter our consciousness. Human beings have a consciousness, and something can be at hand in them of which they know nothing. In that case it is presumably at hand in them, but not at hand in their consciousness. A stone either has a property or does not have it. We, on the contrary, can have something and at the same time not have it, that is, not know of it. We speak, after all, of the unconscious. In one respect it is at hand, and yet in another respect it is not at hand, namely insofar as it is not conscious. This strange ‘at hand and yet at the same time not at hand’ arises from the possibility of being conscious of something unconscious. This distinction between not being there [Nicht-Dasein] in the sense of the unconscious and being there [Dasein] in the sense of what is conscious also seems to be equivalent to what we have in mind by awakening, specifically by the awakening of whatever is sleeping. Yet can we straightforwardly equate sleep with the absence of consciousness? After all, there is also absence of consciousness in being unconscious (which cannot be identified with sleep), and a fortiori in death. This concept of the nonconscious, therefore, is much too broad, irrespective of the question as to whether it is at all suitable. Furthermore, sleep is not simply an absence of consciousness. On the contrary, we know that a peculiar and in many cases extremely animated consciousness pertains precisely to sleep, namely that of dreams, so that here the possibility of characterizing something using the distinction ‘conscious/unconscious’ indeed breaks down. Waking and sleeping are not equivalent to consciousness and unconsciousness.

We can thus see already that we will not get by with the distinction between ‘unconscious’ and ‘conscious’. To awaken an attunement cannot mean simply to make conscious an attunement which was previously unconscious. To awaken an attunement means, after all, to let it become awake and as such precisely to let it be. If, however, we make an attunement conscious, come to know of it and explicitly make the attunement itself into an object of knowledge, we achieve the contrary of an awakening. The attunement is thereby precisely destroyed, or at least not intensified, but weakened and altered.

And yet the fact remains: whenever we awaken an attunement, this entails that it was already there, and yet not there. On the negative side, we have seen that the distinction between being there [Dasein] and not being there [Nichtdasein] is not equivalent to that between consciousness and unconsciousness. From this, however, we may conclude something further: If attunement is something that belongs to man, is ‘in him’, as we say, or if man has an attunement, and if this cannot be clarified with the aid of consciousness and unconsciousness, then we will not come close to this matter at all so long as we take man as something distinguished from material things by the fact that he has consciousness, that he is an animal endowed with reason, a rational animal, or an ego with pure life-experiences that has been tacked on to a body. This conception of man as a living being, a living being that in addition has reason, has led to a complete failure to recognize the essence of attunement. The awakening of attunement, and the attempt to broach this strange task, in the end coincide with the demand for a complete transformation of our conception of man.

In order not to make the problem all too complicated here at the outset, I shall not enter into the question of what sleep properly is. For in a methodological respect one could say that we will acquire information about the essence of awakening only if we clarify what sleeping and waking mean. I shall mention merely that the task of clarifying such phenomena as sleeping and waking cannot be addressed extrinsically as one particular question. Rather, such clarification can occur only on the presupposition that we possess a fundamental conception of how a being must be structurally determined such that it can sleep or be awake. We do not say that the stone is asleep or awake. Yet what about the plant? Here already we are uncertain. It is highly questionable whether the plant sleeps, precisely because it is questionable whether it is awake. We know that the animal sleeps. Yet the question remains as to whether its sleep is the same as that of man, and indeed the question as to what sleep in general is. This problem is intimately bound up with the question concerning the structure of being pertaining to these various kinds of beings: stone, plant, animal, man.

In contrast to the many misinterpretations of sleep in modernity, we see already in the philosophers of antiquity that the fundamental character of sleep shows itself to have been grasped in a much more elementary and immediate manner. Aristotle, who has written a treatise specifically on waking and sleeping (Περὶ ὕπνου καὶ ἐγρηγόρσεως), a treatise which has a peculiar character of its own, has noticed something remarkable in saying that sleep is an ἀκινησία. He does not connect sleep with consciousness or unconsciousness. Rather, he says that sleep is a δεσμός, a being bound, a peculiar way in which αἴσθησις is bound. It is not only a way in which perception is bound, but also our essence, in that it cannot take in other beings which it itself is not. This characterization of sleep is more than an image, and opens up a broad perspective which has by no means been grasped in its metaphysical intent. For fundamental metaphysical reasons we must forego entering into the problem of sleep, and must attempt to clarify on another path what it means to awaken an attunement.

c) The being-there and not-being-there of attunement on the grounds of man’s being as being-there and being-away (being absent).

That it is by no means a matter of the distinction between consciousness and unconsciousness in the case of man when we speak of this simultaneous being-there [Da-sein] and not-being-there [Nicht-Da-sein] becomes clear from an occurrence that happens when we are quite awake, if for the moment we posit awakeness as conscious life in contrast to unconscious life (sleep). How often it happens, in a conversation among a group of people, that we are ‘not there’, how often we find that we were absent, albeit without having fallen asleep. This not-being-there, this being-away [Weg-sein], has nothing at all to do with consciousness or unconsciousness in the usual sense. On the contrary, this not-being-there can be highly conscious. In such being absent we are precisely concerned with ourselves, or with something else. Yet this not-being-there is nonetheless a being-away. Think of the extreme case of madness, where the highest degree of consciousness can prevail and yet we say: The person is de-ranged, displaced, away and yet there. Nor are being-there and being-away identical with waking and sleeping. Why we nevertheless rightly conceive of them in these terms will become apparent later.

We see that this potential to be away ultimately belongs to the way in which man is in general. Yet man has the potential to be away in this manner only if his being has the character of being-there [Da-sein]. We name the being of man being-there, Da-sein, in a sense yet to be determined and in distinction to the being at hand of the stone. In the end, this being-away pertains to the essence of being there [Dasein]. It is not something which happens arbitrarily from time to time, but is an essential characteristic of man’s very being that indicates how he is, so that a human being—insofar as he or she exists—is, in his or her being there, also always already and necessarily away in some manner. All this transpires in such a way that the distinction between ‘conscious’ and ‘unconscious’ turns out not to be a primary one, but can be ascertained both in being there and in being away.

An attunement is to be awakened. Yet this means that it is there and not there. If attunement is something that has the character of ‘there and not there’, then attunement itself has to do with the innermost essence of man’s being, with his Dasein. Attunement belongs to the being of man. The possibility and manner of this ‘there and not there’ has now already been brought closer to us, although we do not yet see it correctly by any means. For as long as we speak in this way—that attunement is there and not there—we take it as something that both appears and does not appear in man. Yet the being-there and being-away of man is something totally different from being at hand or not being at hand. We speak of being at hand or not being at hand, for example, with respect to a stone (e.g., roughness is not at hand in this erratic), or in a particular conception relating to a physical process or indeed even to a so-called emotional experience. Being at hand and not being at hand decide concerning being and non-being. Yet what we have designated as being there [Dasein] and being away [Wegsein] are something in the being of man. They are possible only if and so long as man is. Being away is itself a way of man’s being. Being away does not mean: not being at all. It is rather a way of Da-sein’s being-there. The stone, in its being away, is precisely not there. Man however must be there in order to be able to be away, and only so long as he is there does he in general have the possibility of an ‘away’.

Accordingly, if attunement indeed belongs to the being of man we may not speak of it or take it as though it were at hand or not at hand. Yet people will reply: Who will deny us that? Attunements—joy, contentment, bliss, sadness, melancholy, anger—are, after all, something psychological, or better, psychic; they are emotional states. We can ascertain such states in ourselves and in others. We can even record how long they last, how they rise and fall, the causes which evoke and impede them. Attunements or, as one also says, ‘feelings’, are events occurring in a subject. Psychology, after all, has always distinguished between thinking, willing, and feeling. It is not by chance that it will always name feeling in the third, subordinate position. Feelings are the third class of lived experience. For naturally man is in the first place the rational living being. Initially, and in the first instance, this rational living being thinks and wills. Feelings are certainly also at hand. Yet are they not merely, as it were, the adornment of our thinking and willing, or something that obfuscates and inhibits these? After all, feelings and attunements constantly change. They have no fixed subsistence, they are that which is most inconstant. They are merely a radiance and shimmer, or else something gloomy, something hovering over emotional events. Attunements—are they not like the utterly fleeting and ungraspable shadows of clouds flitting across the landscape?

One can certainly take attunements this way, as shades and side-effects of other emotional events. Indeed hitherto they have basically always been taken this way. This characterization is indisputably correct. Yet one would not wish to claim, either, that this ordinary conception is the sole possible one or even the decisive one simply because it lies closest and can most easily be accommodated within the ancient conception of man. For attunements are not a mere emotional event or a state, in the way that a metal is liquid or solid, given that attunements indeed belong to the being of man. Therefore, we must now ask: How are we to grasp attunement positively as belonging to the essence of man, and how are we to relate toward man himself if we wish to awaken an attunement?

Before pursuing this question, let us review what has been said thus far regarding the task of our lecture course. We are confronting the task of awakening a fundamental attunement in our philosophizing. Attunements are something that cannot be straightforwardly ascertained in a universally valid way, like a fact that we could lead everyone to see. Not only can an attunement not be ascertained, it ought not to be ascertained, even if it were possible to do so. For all ascertaining means bringing to consciousness. With respect to attunement, all making conscious means destroying, altering in each case, whereas in awakening an attunement we are concerned to let this attunement be as it is, as this attunement. Awakening means letting an attunement be, one which, prior to this, has evidently been sleeping, if we may employ this image to begin with in accordance with linguistic usage. Attunement is in a certain way there and not there. We have seen that this distinction between being-there and not-being-there has a p...