What we indicate ontologically by the term ‘state of mind’ is ontically the most familiar and everyday sort of thing; our mood, our Being-attuned. Prior to all psychology of moods … it is necessary to see this phenomenon as a fundamental existentiale, and to outline its structure …
In having a mood, Dasein is always disclosed moodwise as that entity to which it has been delivered over in its Being; and in this way it has been delivered over to the Being which, in existing, it has to be. ‘To be disclosed’ does not mean ‘to be known as this sort of thing’. And even in the most indifferent and inoffensive everydayness, the Being of Dasein can burst forth as a naked ‘that it is and has to be’. The pure ‘that is’ shows itself, but the ‘whence’ and the ‘whither’ remain in darkness. The fact that it is just as everyday a matter for Dasein not to ‘give in’ to such moods, in other words not to follow up their disclosure and allow itself to be brought before that which is disclosed, is no evidence against the phenomenal facts of the case, in which the Being of the ‘there’ is disclosed moodwise in its ‘that it is’; it is rather evidence for it. In an ontico-existentiell sense, Dasein for the most part evades the Being which is disclosed in the mood. In an ontologico-existential sense this means that even in that to which such a mood pays no attention, Dasein is unveiled in its Being-delivered-over to the ‘there’. In the evasion of itself, the ‘there’ is something disclosed.
This characteristic of Dasein’s being – this ‘that it is’ – is veiled in its ‘whence’ and ‘whither’, yet disclosed in itself all the more unveiledly. We call this the thrownness of this entity into its ‘there’; indeed, it is thrown in such a way that, as Being-in-the-world, it is the ‘there’…An entity of the character of Dasein is its ‘there’ in such a way that, whether explicitly or not, it finds itself in its thrownness. In a state-of-mind, Dasein is always brought before itself, and has always found itself, not in the sense of coming across itself by perceiving itself, but in the sense of finding itself in the mood that it has.
Specimen Questions
1 What did Heidegger mean by saying that ‘Dasein always understands itself in terms of its existence’?
2 What did Heidegger mean by saying that we understand the being of an object like a hammer in terms of its ‘readiness-to-hand’?
3 Explain Heidegger’s notion of Dasein, in opposition to such rival notions as ‘the biological human being’, or ‘the person’.
Suggestions for Further Reading (Including Internet Resources)
1 M. Heidegger, Being and Time [Sein und Zeit, 1927], trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962).
2 For a clear and accessible introduction to Heidegger’s thought, see G. Steiner, Heidegger (2nd edn, London: Harper Collins, 1992), and for a more detailed commentary, H. L. Dreyfus, Being in the World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s ‘Being and Time’, Division I (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991).
3 For a useful collection of essays on all aspects of Heidegger’s philosophy, see C. B. Guignon (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
4 Two recommendable introductory guides to Heidegger are S. Mulhall, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Heidegger and ‘Being and Time’, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2005), and also M. Wrathall, How to Read Heidegger (London: Granta, 2005).
5 There are several useful online resources: see, for example, the excellent entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy at https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/heidegger/ (by M. Wheeler); and further, the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy at https://www.iep.utm.edu/heidegge/ (by W. J. Korab-Karpowicz).
6 A site dedicated to information on Heidegger and links to related web pages in English can be found at http://www.beyng.com/. The Partially Examined Life (M. Linsenmayer) has a free preview podcast on Heidegger’s Being and Time at https://partiallyexaminedlife.com/2011/02/07/episode-32-heidegger-what-is-being/. And S. West of Philosophize This! explains Heidegger in a podcast on Podtail, ‘Episode 100: Heidegger – Phenomenology and Dasein’ at https://podtail.com/en/podcast/philosophize-this/episode-100-heidegger-pt-1-phenomenology-and/.
Notes
* Martin Heidegger, being and time [Sein und Zeit, 1927], excerpts from §§ 1, 2, 3, 4, 15, 26, 29. Trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), pp. 21, 25, 31, 32–5, 95–8, 160–1, 172–4.
1 1 Cf. Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism [L’existentialisme est un humanisme, 1946].
2 2 Heidegger’s term is ‘falling’: Being and Time, § 38.
11 The End of Metaphysics? Rudolf Carnap, The Elimination of Metaphysics*
The whole enterprise of metaphysics came under heavy attack in the 1920s and 1930s from a group of philosophers (originally based in Vienna) who came to be known as ‘logical positivists’. Prominent among these was Rudolph Carnap, who taught at Vienna and Prague, and later (after emigrating to the United States in 1936) at Chicago and Los Angeles. One of the slogans of the positivists (to be found in the extract that follows) was ‘the meaning of a statement lies in the method of its verification’. David Hume, as we have seen (extract 7, above), insisted that all our knowledge concerning matters of fact must be based on experience; Immanuel Kant (extract 8) had denied the viability of metaphysics that attempted to free itself from all reference to sensory experience. Carnap’s position is that the traditional claims of metaphysicians are, in the strict sense, meaningless: they are ‘pseudo-statements’ that fail to assert anything at all.
Carnap argues first, that many of the individual words used by metaphysicians are no more than ‘empty shells’, since those who use them do not provide any empirical criterion for their use. In order to be meaningful a given word ‘F’ must be supported by rules which enable us to verify, in a concrete case, whether something is F or not. For a word (such as ‘arthropod’) to mean something, it must be possible to specify the truth-conditions for the basic sentences in which that word occurs (these basic sentences are ones whose content can be fixed through some kind of observation or sensory experience). So for Carnap the only meaningful sentences are either those which (like those of logic and mathematics) are true simply in virtue of their form, or those which ‘fall within the domain of empirical science’. ‘Any statement one desires to construct which does not fall within these categories is automatically meaningless.’
Using this framework, Carnap argues that it is overgenerous to dismiss traditional metaphysics as merely a collection of ‘speculations’ or ‘fairy tales’. For assertions in these latter categories, though we may dismiss