Dwelling

Heidegger, Archaeology, Mortality

Philip Tonner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780367887636
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351602570
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

Dwelling: Heidegger, Archaeology, Mortality negotiates the discourses of phenomenology, archaeology and palaeoanthropology in order to extend the 'dwelling perspective', an approach in the social sciences particularly associated with Tim Ingold and a number of other thinkers, including Chris Tilley, Julian Thomas, Chris Gosden and Clive Gamble, that developed out of an engagement with the thought of Martin Heidegger.

This unique book deals with Heidegger's philosophy as it has been explored in archaeology and anthropology, seeking to expand its cross-disciplinary engagement into accounts of early humans and death awareness. Tonner reads Heidegger's thought of dwelling in connection to recent developments in the archaeology of mortuary practice amongst our ancestors. Agreeing with Heidegger that an awareness of death marks out a distinctive way of 'being-in-the-world', Tonner rejects any relict anthropocentrism in Heidegger's thought and seeks to break down simple divisions between humans and pre-humans.

This book is ideal for readers wishing to cross disciplinary boundaries and to challenge anthropocentric thinking in accounts of human evolution. It would be ideal for professional researchers in the fields covered by the book as well as for graduate students and advanced undergraduates.

1
Introduction

I

This book is about ‘dwelling’, both as a theory and as a way of being. Given this, what follows has two principal aims. Firstly, I shall explore what has come to be called the ‘dwelling perspective’, as this has been outlined in recent archaeological and anthropological theory. Secondly, I will discuss the notion of dwelling in the existential sense in terms that might allow us to deploy this concept in archaeology, specifically in connection to early evidence of mortuary practice in the archaeology of the Palaeolithic. My hope is that the interplay of these two aims will prompt interesting questions in the history of archaeological thought, contemporary theory and, more generally, with regards to human evolution (broadly conceived).

The overriding contribution that I hope to make in this work is partly theoretical and partly methodological: on the theoretical level it amounts to the claim that an engagement with Heidegger’s thought is profitable to scholars engaged in understanding prehistoric practices, particularly surrounding death. Drawing upon some of Heidegger’s remarks in a number of texts, it is possible to draw out and expand upon what he says in Being and Time (1927) concerning the archaeological record as ‘material for the disclosure of the Dasein [being-there-here-now] that has-been-there’ (Heidegger 1962: 245. Square brackets: my additions). On the methodological level my claim is that the phenomenological method (not necessarily just Heidegger’s version of phenomenology) can be applied with the necessary alterations in archaeological studies. To serve these ends, I have integrated my discussions of Heidegger, phenomenological philosophy and archaeology throughout the chapters that follow rather than to try to attempt to discuss each in one place only.

I belong to a group of readers of Heidegger who believe that we should move away from what is sometimes called Heidegger’s anthropocentrism. I argue here that it is possible to develop a reading of some of Heidegger’s key insights that allows for their extension to our pre-modern ancestors, ancestors for which, in its current form, Heidegger’s thought can’t really account. Here, then, I argue for a phenomenological archaeology that goes ‘beyond the human’, as we might understand it, and that tries to inhabit the ‘Dasein that has been there’.

I suggest that the defining feature of Dasein, ‘care’ or dwelling, is evidenced by the archaeological record of human becoming in the remote past: this is particularly evident when considering the record of early mortuary practice. I suggest that our ancestors ‘cared for’ or ‘dwelled with’ their dead, and while doing so, appropriated parts of the world into their lifeworld. For example, the cave of the Sima de los Huesos, a site that was formed somewhere in the date range of the Lower Palaeolithic in Europe, where our ancestors deposited somewhere in the region of 28–32 individuals in a shaft within a deep cave in the Sierra de Atapuerca in Spain, evidences a form of ‘prehistoric dwelling’. Care (Sorge) is evidenced by looking after the world and by looking after compatriots within it and I will suggest here that such an existential state had been reached before the time of the Upper Palaeolithic and the advent of ‘modern human beings’, what Heidegger calls ‘primitive Dasein’. Complex mortuary practice and the extending of meaning into places, as evidenced in the remote past at sites like the Sima, is the hallmark of dwelling. The between of ‘animality’ and ‘humanity’ is prehistoric dwelling.

Instead of denoting a single monolithic ‘perspective’, reference to ‘dwelling’ actually refers to a collection of related perspectives that have all, in one way or another, engaged with phenomenological philosophy and, in particular, the work of Martin Heidegger.¹ The editors of the recent Rout-ledge Companion to Phenomenology (2012), Sebastian Luft and Søren Overgaard, identify three notions that unite phenomenological philosophers. Phenomenologists are all concerned to work out of the first-person perspective, in order to describe what is given to intentionality (the ‘aboutness’ of mental phenomena, consciousness’ directedness toward the world). Phenomenology is a ‘working philosophy’, an Arbeitsphilosophie, committed to rigorous research that produces intersubjectively verifiable results, an ethos bequeathed to the ‘movement’ by its founder Edmund Husserl. Just as there are multiple ‘dwelling perspectives’ there are also many variations on the phenomenological theme (see Gallagher 2012: 10).

The term ‘dwelling’ is now being used in a technical sense in the archaeo-logical and anthropological literature. The ‘concept’ of dwelling originates in Heidegger’s philosophy of being.² The German term Wohnen, translated as ‘dwelling’, isn’t itself a technical philosophical term and while the word does appear in Heidegger’s early works (Being and Time [1927] and his lectures on the concept of time), it becomes much more important in his later writings.³ An engagement with Heidegger’s thought has prompted changes in both anthropology and archaeology. For one thing, both disciplines are moving away from playing out their debates about human becoming in a Cartesian Theatre committed to a division between subjects (minds, animate and sentient) and objects (inanimate and non-sentient) (Gamble 2008: 107) and toward doing so in a Heideggerian Theatre, a place ‘where it all comes together’, to the extent that ‘it’ comes together ‘at all’ (Clark 2008: 217).⁴

For Clark, the body is the ‘Heideggerian Theatre’, and taking embodiment seriously just amounts to embracing ‘a more balanced view of our cognitive (indeed, our human) nature’ (Clark 2008: 217). Heidegger’s achievement was to have presented a novel account of human existence where what he called ‘Dasein’ (being-there-here-now) unifies mind and body, self and world. Heidegger puts it this way:

Self and world belong together in the single entity, the Dasein … self and world are the basic determination of the Dasein itself in the unity of the structure of being-in-the-world.

(Heidegger 1982: 297)

Dasein’s basic state is being-in-the-world (In-der-welt-sein) and being-inthe-world is unified by what Heidegger called ‘care’ (Sorge). Care designates Dasein’s pre-theoretical ‘openness’ to its world. What Heidegger called the ‘ontological meaning’ of care is Dasein’s temporality. Dasein’s ‘present’ (which carries its past with it while pressing into its future) is understood by Heidegger as a ‘being-together-with’: Dasein is a fundamentally social being that exists in a meaningful world wherein meaningful beings, including others, animals and objects, are encountered and made meaningful by a process of appropriation (Wheeler 2014). To that extent, Heidegger’s notions of being-in-the-world, dwelling and care, are more or less synonymous.

II

Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) was one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century.⁵ Along with Edmund Husserl, he is one of the central figures in the history of phenomenological philosophy. He is also a pivotal figure in the history of existentialism, hermeneutics and post-structuralism. He is also a divisive and controversial thinker. Not only did his style of doing philosophy contribute to a growing divide between philosophical cultures (the so-called Analytic-Continental Divide), his political engagement proved disastrous.⁶ Heidegger’s early intellectual development was shaped by his rural Catholicism and his studies in religion. His early works, (notably his Habilitation thesis), reflect both his interests in scholastic thought and his training in modern epistemology and his early life does evidence certain tensions in his complex relationship with religion that would resurface throughout his life and career. Max Müller reported that when on hikes Heidegger, who was by this time in his later years, would stop, dip his finger into the stoup and genuflect, whenever passing a church or chapel. When Müller asked why he did this, and whether or not it was inconsistent with his earlier distancing of himself from the ‘dogma of the church’, Heidegger reported that ‘One must think historically. And where there has been so much praying, there the divine is present in a very special way’ (Safranski 1998: 432–433).

In Being and Time Heidegger fused phenomenology and hermeneutics. One way of approaching his project is to see it as a hermeneutic transformation (rather than a Hegelian transformation) of Kant’s Copernican Revolution. That is, rather than seek to find the a priori in a pure transcendental subject, like Kant and Husserl did, in their own ways, a priori structures are to be approached in the life of a ‘factic’ individual who is finite, embedded and embodied within a specific historical and linguistic context. The transcendental subject is transformed in Heidegger’s thought into practically engaged Dasein. A Dasein is the engaged agent, whose actual identity and self-understanding (as, for example, ‘David’, who is a father, husband, mechanic and so on) is grounded in and emerges from the holistic context that structures their activities. Individuals are never isolated and de-contextualised: individuals always take their social investments and identities with them in their actions (we act ‘as a father’ or ‘as a mechanic’ or ‘as a tax payer’). It is such prior practical leaning into the world that is the ultimate ground of our intellectual practices. The dwelling perspective developed out of an engagement with Heidegger’s account of human Dasein as ‘poetically dwelling on this earth’.

The phenomenological approach is descriptive in that it attempts to reveal what appears to us in an unprejudiced way. It attends to the ‘evidence’ that presents itself to our ‘grasp’ or to our ‘intuition’. This notion of ‘evidence’ is Husserl’s technical term for that occurrence when a phenomenon shows itself to a consciousness. If that evidence, which is the self-showing of the phenomenon, is ‘perfect’ or ‘adequate’ the phenomenon will reveal itself completely, leaving no aspect hidden. Heidegger revised Husserl’s notion of evidence in terms of truth. Truth, for Heidegger, means self-showing or unconcealment (aletheia), and it can occur, or be revealed, only because Dasein (being there, here, now) is a historical being. Perfect disclosure or unconcealment of beings in their truth is impossible: all unconcealment is accompanied by concealment; the other way of putting this is to say that truth is accompanied by un truth.

While beings with sensory organs like us can see colour such beings cannot see ‘being-coloured’: such beings can feel softness, they cannot feel ‘being-soft’. However, when considered as a phenomenon, ‘being’ must show itself to us somehow. Husserl argued that the categorical structures that shape our experience (being, unity, place and so on) are encounterable through our power of categorial intuition. Heidegger took this insight as a challenge to investigate the phenomenon of being. He says: ‘there are acts [of consciousness] in which ideal constituents [such as Being] show themselves in themselves’ (Heidegger 1992: 71). Being is not invented by us and it is not something that we project into the world. Rather, it is something that can be given to us as a phenomenon and investigated. Husserl’s notion of categorial intuition paved the way for Heidegger’s question of being: Heidegger reinterprets this doctrine to mean that in one’s own existence as a historically-situated and entangled agent the human being possesses an understanding of being.

The term that emerges in Heidegger’s thought for getting at his central concern is Ereignis (the event of appropriation). This concern can be glossed (following Thomas Sheehan’s interpretation of it) as follows: Heidegger was interested in the finite disclosure of being (or meaningful presence) in conjunction with the opening up of Dasein (as a finite being). Being or meaning is only ever given to us partially: it is never fully disclosed. So, if we think of being as historical intelligibility, then what Heidegger is saying is that we can never hope to attain a non-historical point of view on things. Finite disclosure happens in the life of a historically-situated agent, a Dasein. What makes this possible is, in a word, death. It is finitude that makes us sensitive to or ‘open to’ the world (being) as a meaningful place wherein one/I must live.

The term Ereignis picks out ‘disclosure as such’, not any particular event of disclosure for a Dasein and a Dasein is a disclosing or interested being. Ereignis signals our being appropriated into our openness (being existentially brought to our sensitivity to the world because of our precarious finite existence in it). The event of appropriation is that movement of our being opened up by virtue of our essential finitude in such a way as to creatively receive and conserve a meaningful world of things. To study our activities we must interpret them, together with the meanings that things have for us in terms of them. To do this involves focussing on the contextual relationships that we have with things and others in our world. For Heidegger, it is our finitude, our finite temporality (our being-towards-death) that makes us sensitive to being. Our understanding of being is made possible by our finite temporality and temporality (time) is the meaning of all modes of being.

Heidegger’s hermeneutics is bound up with his phenomenological ontology and his fundamental ontology of Dasein’s being-in-the-world as finitude (Dasein’s basic certainty is, after all, that it will die). Heidegger’s insight was that understanding (Verstehen) is the central dimension of being-in-the-world. Understanding is not just a subjective event. All things are given order and meaning by human beings in terms of their possibility for interaction or appropriation into a task or project. Objects and events are understood in terms of our involvement, or possible involvement, with them and they exist only as part of a system of possible encounters. It is within this system of possible encounters that things refer to or relate to, or point at, other things within the system. Both the phenomenological and hermeneutic dimensions of Heidegger’s thought take their point of departure from the fundamental reorientation of inquiry toward the description and interpretation of our basic state as Dasein, as being-in-the-world, and away from any account of us as a disembodied or isolated Cartesian self.

III

Heidegger remains the key figure in the history of the notion of dwelling in the humanities and social sciences, and my argument here is that the thought of dwelling and care will provoke us to look at the archaeological record differently. At the same time, the archaeological record itself announces that Heidegger’s anthropocentrism, his radical dichotomisation of humans and animals, is unsustainable. Our pre-modern more ‘animal’ ancestors were engaging with the world in a meaningful way and so doing them justice, while engaging with Heidegger, will necessarily involve revising aspects of his thought and of moving away from other aspects of it. I hope that what I present here will further this task of engaging with Heidegger’s oeuvre for the sake of archaeology, anthropology and philosophy.

As noted, we can think of ‘being’ for Heidegger as meaning ‘the very relatedness to our understanding and interest that things can have for us’. This relation to our understanding and our interest is grounded in our finite natures. It is only because we are not going to last forever, for example, that we find particular things important to do today rather than other things. I pursue the project of being an archaeologist today because it is not a possibility that will be there for me indefinitely. Such ‘being so related’ to me as an interested agent within a world is the ‘that on the basis of which’ beings are understood. This ‘being so related’ is the meaning and ground of beings. The world takes on the shape it does for me because of my concern to pursue the possibility of being...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Heidegger and the dwelling perspective
• 3 Origins
• 4 Dwelling and mortality
• 5 Modernity, dwelling and phenomenological archaeology
• 6 Conclusion
• Index