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Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger's Being and Time, Division I

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BEING-IN-THE-WORLD : A Commentary on Heidegger's 'Being and Time,' Division I. By Herbert L. Dreyfus. 370 pp. Cambridge, Massachusetts : The MIT Press, Eighth Printing 1999 (1991). ISBN 0-262-54056-8 (pbk.)

Anyone who attempts to study Heidegger's commentators will quickly discover that many of them can be even more difficult than Heidegger himself. One notable exception is George Steiner, whose 'Martin Heidegger' (1989) is such an interesting book that one wishes it had been two or three times longer. As a general introduction to Heidegger's life and thought, however, it can only take one so far, and those wishing for a fuller treatment would be well advised to take a look at the present equally lucid and stimulating study by Dreyfus.

He explains that he has limited detailed treatment of 'Being and Time' to Division I of Part One (i.e., the first half), because he considers this "the most original and important section of the work, for it is [here] that Heidegger works out his account of being-in-the-world and uses it to ground a profound critique of traditional ontology and epistemology" (p.vii). Division II, though containing important material, is marred by "some errors so serious as to block any consistent reading" (p.viii), though it is taken up in a 57-page Appendix.

In his brief but extremely interesting Introduction, Dreyfus sets out to answer the question, 'Why study Heidegger?' If I have understood Dreyfus correctly, what he seems to be saying is that Western thought has been fundamentally in error since the time of Plato : "Plato and our tradition got off on the wrong track by thinking that one could have a theory of everything.... Heidegger is not against theory. He thinks it powerful and important, but limited" (p.2).

Heidegger, in other words, although accepting a reasonable use of reason, has seen through the folly of that worship of reason which leads to its unreasonable and excessive use. Dreyfus tells us that Heidegger seeks to clear away five main false assumptions :

1. Explicitness. "Heidegger questions both the possibility and desirability of making our everyday understanding explicit" (p.4). There are and always will be many things in life that cannot be made explicit, that cannot be explained, that are not amenable to "critical reflection," things, for example, such as human skills.

2. Mental Representation. "Heidegger questions the view that experience is always and most basically a relation between a self-contained subject with mental content (the inner) and an independent object (the outer)." For him "there is a more fundamental way of being-in-the-world that cannot be understood in subject/object terms" (p.5).

3. Theoretical Holism. Heidegger "insists that we return to the phenomenon of everyday human activity and stop ringing the changes on the traditional oppositions of immanent/transcendent ... subject/ object ... explicit/tacit ... etc." (p.6).

4. Detachment and Objectivity. "From the Greeks we inherit not only our assumption that we can obtain theoretical knowledge of every domain, even human activities, but also our assumption that the detached theoretical viewpoint is superior to the involved practical viewpoint" (p.6). Heidegger, following the insights of Nietzsche, Peirce, James and Dewey, denies these assumptions.

5. Methodological Individualism. Heidegger, "in his emphasis on the social context as the ultimate foundation of intelligibility [shares with Wittgenstein] the view that most philosophical problems can be dis(solved) [sic] by a description of everyday social practices" (p.7). In other words, they are pseudo-problems.

If Heidegger were only clearing the ground of 2,500 years of sheer wrongheadedness, he would of course still be an extremely important and valuable thinker. But, as Dreyfus explains, he goes further, for "he has a positive account of authentic human being and a positive methodological proposal for how human being should be systematically studied" (p.8). His influence, which today extends into many areas, has been and continues to be enormous as more and more specialists and experts and technicians of every kind begin to appreciate the fruitfulness of his way of thinking in contrast to the often dismal results produced by their own.

Heidegger's 'Being and Time' is a notoriously difficult book, and Dreyfus' commentary is to be welcomed as the first study that succeeds in making it both intelligible and exciting, even to the non-specialist reader such as myself. As one of the clearest accounts of Heidegger's thought to date, it belongs in the library of anyone who is at all interested in this revolutionary and amazing thinker.

I am amazed that this book has not been reviewed. For 30-odd years Hubert Dreyfus has been the beloved guide to Heidegger and Continental philosophy for thousands of undergraduate and graduate students, first at MIT and then at Berkeley. This book is constructed from the courses he taught on Heidegger's work, Kierkegaard, and especially that difficult centerpiece of Heidegger's opus, Being and Time. For the beginner and the expert, he opens Heidegger's questions and claims in distinctive, poignant, simple, accessible ways. I cannot imagine attempting to grasp Heidegger's thought without Dreyfus at my side. Dreyfus' account shows Heidegger in the middle of the struggle with those who came before him as he attempts to make sense of the question of what a human being is. I strongly recommend this book as a helpmate. If you are interested in confronting Heidegger's thought and work, get and read Dreyfus.

I got to this book after reading "Disclosing New Worlds" by Charles Spinosa, Fernando Flores, and Hubert L. Dreyfus, a very profound work that tries to recover our abilities to make sense of each of us as historical beings, helping us to "live life at its best."

Reading Being-in-the-World has had a great impact on the way I now understand our everyday life in terms of the practices that we pick up -as Heidegger puts it- from the society we are brought up in and not in terms of abstract theories that try to relate our specific actions to mental states. As a management consultant, it guides me away from trying to specify precisely, say, the 'things' a salesman should say and do in a conversation with a client. I'd be better off if I can find another salesman that exhibits the results I'm interested in, and managing a "learning-in-action" program, so that the first salesman learns from the more experienced salesman. As a father, it guides me away from getting my son to hold on to vast amounts of information -the purpose of our modern educational system- but to situating him in an environment where he can pickup successful practices for dealing with diverse situations- including technical and interpersonal problems.

Being-in-the-World was not an easy read for me, since my background is in Computer Science and Management (I had to do some research in the philosophical traditions and problemas that Heidegger was attacking). However, Dreyfus' commentary is most relevant to people in Computer Science and Management - guiding them away from the utopias of Artificial Intelligence and Decision Support Systems.

I recommend this book to anyone willing to make an effort in understanding one of the deepest thinkers on what it means to be a human being "living life at its best."

I have gone through this book at least three times and I find it to be the clearest and most easily understandable companion to Heidegger's magnum opus. One of the things that makes this book so special is that Dreyfus' is giving us his class notes and updating them every year until after some 25 years we have a very refined and distilled product . I have yet to find anyone who can equal the clarity here.

I read this book for a graduate seminar on philosophy. Hubert Dreyfus' book helps to illuminate one of the most influential philosophical books of the twentieth century, Martin Heidegger's "Being and Time," which deconstructs phenomenology. Heidegger's kind of phenomenology has to do with the idea of phenomenon, which means something that appears and shows itself. His criticism of traditional philosophy is that it gets started with categories, concepts, and notions, departing from the way human comprehension of this world first shows itself. This is Aristotelian and Aristotle is an enormous influence on Heidegger.

Yet, there is something very radical going on here, and that is the idea of "being" is connected to meaning and negativity. In the history of philosophy, being has a positive concept, something that "is" thus, the opposite of being is none being. Heidegger wants to show how the meaning of being is distorted by this understanding of being as a purely positive concept, as a "thing" a full present entity. For Example, he also very much critiques in modern art, the modern conception of objectivity, the world is transformed into an object independent of art, of its significance, its meaning, or interest in it. This was due in large part because of modern science, and its strong sense of objectification converting nature into a set of mere objects, time, and space that are measurable and analyzable through scientific means. Meaning, importance, and significance for Heidegger equals value; science and nature have none of this as pure objects. Therefore, anything of meaning, and of significance would be transferred into the subject it would be simply the human estimation, nature itself has no meaning or significance in that respect.

Heidegger critiques this scientific model. As he says in his phenomenology, "Well how is it that human existence first understands itself? Here he is talking about things that are very ordinary and complex. We are in a world that has significance, it is meaningful to us, it matters to us, it fits into our interests in such a way that we are absorbed into its significance. So, when we come across the world, first and foremost it is not a mere object that is standing apart from us or our mind, but rather it has significant elements of our environment that fit into our lives. Some things are significant, or they are useful, or dangerous, or satisfying, etc. What Heidegger wants to say in his phenomenology is we have to pay attention to this way of being. Therefore, first and foremost he says "being" matters, it matters to us. "Being" is a significance, it is not just a bare object or a bare fact. Heidegger doesn't accept this idea of subject on one side and object on the other side, that means that when humans have their understanding of the world, it is not just a human projection, it is not just a human construction. It is a revealing way of seeing; it is world disclosive. The meaning of the world wouldn't happen without us, because we are the ones that find it meaningful. Therefore, it is most important to understand that for Heidegger there is no object subject distinction. The term he uses to illustrate his idea is "Dasien" which means "human existence," Heidegger chooses it because he doesn't want to deal with the subject, or mind or consciousness, he wants to use a word that does not subjectivefy things. He uses "Dasien" as "humans being there" in this world and not just staying apart from it.

Humans are a being in the world, a term he uses is, "we dwell" in the world, we don't come across it as some bare thing in the world we "dwell" in it. Therefore, "meaningfulness" is a primary notion of being. Secondly, the meaning of "being" is connected with the notion of negativity. This is the notion of "being" moving toward death, and anxiety. Thus, the way that humans understand being is in part because of opposite of non-being and death is a perfect example of that. Humans are distinct because we understand that we are mortal, that we die. We are aware of death even when we are not in danger, which means we understand being and our world. Heidegger made a lot out of the fact that the Greeks understood this, that they were mortals, and that was no accident he thought. That death is a primary aspect of what it means to be human. If you are aware of death as he says, then you can be aware of the meaning of life. The meaning of life comes to us because we understand that we are finite, that we are mortal and not in control.

Another way to understand Heidegger is a wonderful analysis of the idea that the word "being" has become a noun in philosophy, like first things of beings, or things that are. Yet Heidegger says in the Greek language and other western languages this idea of "being" grammatically in language is derived from a verb, the primary verb "to be." Moreover, as a verb it is tensed which means it has to do with time. All verbs are tensed, even Aristotle said, "That is the difference between a verb and a noun." The difference between a verb and a noun, a verb is something that has to do with time, not just action, but time. That is why all verbs are tensed as future, and past. The very fact that time is another perfect indication of negativity, because time is ever changing, ever moving, and when we are in the present, the past is time of negativity it is no longer. When we are in the present, the future is kind of negative it is not yet. Yet we understand these negatives as meaningful, that is why we can get upset about the past that it is not happening anymore, and why we can become excited about the future even though it hasn't happened yet, they have meaning to us.

Another important feature of Heidegger's book is where he takes on the notion of skepticism. Skepticism is a classic problem in philosophy, it is really fostered by Descartes and Hume, and it has to do with the subject/object division. Skeptics argue that the mind is on one side of the fence, the outside world is on the other side, and the mind is something that comes across the world and just processes it, according to its categories of thinking, this is a very common modern construction of skepticism. If this skeptical construct were true, then it is very possible for someone to ask the question; "well how do we know that our minds that are on this side of the fence can ever really know that it is accurately talking about what is on the other side of the fence? If it is separated like this, how can we be sure that what we think about is actually the case? Heidegger is not talking here about ordinary skepticism, like wonder or "I am not sure" kind of skepticism; but what Heidegger argues against is the kind of radical skepticism, which asks, can we be sure of any of our knowledge. This idea plays on two objects, the subject object divide if we are on this side of the subject how can we ever know we are accurately talking about something. Secondly, is the certainty because the skeptic is someone who says well, "I really want to find with 100% certainty, and if I can find any reason for doubt then I am not going to commit. Heidegger says this is a classic philosophical problem that doesn't make any sense whatsoever. Because, no existing human self could ever radically call into question its environment and this world. It doesn't make any sense. You can call into question this or that aspect of it, but never the whole thing and never to say; "well it's possible that what humans say about the world may not have anything to do with the world." Even Descartes and Hume knew this was perverse, but they said this is what philosophy has to do. Radical skepticism is perverse to Heidegger. Skeptics like Descartes and Hume if right why are they writing to an audience. The very practice of skepticism undermines the idea of skepticism. Heidegger says, "Well if our practices betray the project of skepticism, which even Hume admits, he says I would go mad." You can't live as a radical skeptic. This skepticism can apply to things like morals and beauty values and artistic things, because they don't satisfy strict standards of knowledge and certainty.

To reiterate, it is important to know that Heidegger primarily wants to say that the meaning of being, is something that humans are involved with in a significant meaningful way, and it can't be either subjective or objective, those two ideas he says are polarizations that both account for how the world matters to us. The fact that it matters to us means it can't be a pure objective thing. Secondly, the fact that what matters to us is our world not just our opinions and our inner dispositions mean it can't be just a subjective thing. We are absorbed in the world; we are caught up in it. Heidegger's phenomenology wants to give voice to these notions rather than start with the modern categories of subjectivity and objectivity.

I recommend this work for anyone interested in philosophy, epistemology, and ontology.

Dreyfus is able to write one of the strongest intros to Being and Time because of his background: instead of spending his entire career trying to work out the esoteric details of this text, as many history of philosophy professors do, he as appropriated his understanding into his own unique and important work on modern technologies. The result is that he is able to relate this understanding, although of course it will have its personal emphases (as any intro does... the only text that lets you know truly and fully what Heidegger is up to without a slant, is Being and Time itself), clearly and effectively; other scholars let their specialist debates overly influence and complicate their introductory work.
The only work about Being and Time that deserves five stars, however, is Being and Time... and even though this work is notoriously difficult, please do try to read it primarily and then use these aids for clarification if you ares stuck.

Not only an introduction, but a constant companion. I'm on my third copy of this book; the first two literally fell apart from constant use. Whenever I'm reading Heidegger,or any commentary or other work on Heidegger, Dreyfus is always close by. Whatever he may think of his own shortcomings, there's really no one else like him. One reason is that he thinks about Heidegger the way Heidegger would think about himself. Using Dreyfus as a guide, you don't have to worry about being led down the wrong road to a dead end. Dreyfus writes with all the clarity of any analytic philosopher, but is not hagridden by the ontological biases inherent in analytic philosophy as an ideology. And make no mistake about it: in Anglo-American philosophy, the analytic tradition does define an ideology. It offers a worldview which Heidegger (correctly, I submit) rejected. To try to translate Heidegger into the jargon of analytic philosophy is to misunderstand him from the start.

Before you even begin to read "Being and Time," or any other work by Heidegger, read this book by Dreyfus first, even if not from cover to cover. Then get a copy of "Being and Time"; either the Macquarrie & Robinson or the Stambaugh translations will do, but I would recommend getting both. If you do German, then try to get the Max Niemeyer edition of "Sein und Zeit." Then go through Dreyfus again, this time along with "Being an Time," so that you can put Heidegger's dense and sometimes convoluted prose into context. When you've finished this phase of your study of Heidegger, then I would recommend moving back in time, and reading Heidegger's earlier works. You will then see "Being and Time" in its formative stages. Two excellent primary sources (with ample commentary), both available from Amazon, are "Ontology: the Hermeneutics of Facticity," and "Supplements: from the Earliest Essays to Being and Time and Beyond."

If you're a hard-core philosopher or Heidegger aficionado, you may want to include in your study such sources as Plato, Parmenides, Heraclitus, Aristotle, Augustine, Duns Scotus, Luther, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Brentano, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Dilthey, Husserl (especially), and a host of others, all of whom had an influence on his thought, as well as his own students, contemporaries, and people who were influenced by him (Gadamer, Arendt, Jaspers, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, Foucault, et al.), as well as thinkers in the Far East.

Now, why go through all this? Why is Heidegger worth the time and effort needed to understand him? Because, after Heidegger, there's simply no going back to pre-Heidegger. Not that everyone agrees with this; in fact, until recently, very few did. However, slowly but surely, Heidegger is acquiring an audience of serious thinkers, who understand that he got philosophy moving in a direction that, to use market terminology, allows no retracement. When I say that there's no going back to pre-Heidegger, I don't mean that everything earlier than Heidegger is obsolete. As he himself would have been the first to assert, there can be no answer without a question. And those giants whose thought articulated the great questions are no less part of the ongoing project which is philosophy than others (including Heidegger) who stood on their shoulders.

Yet, even if there are no answers without questions, there can be questions without answers. And this is especially unsettling to human beings, whose "reason," is, as Kant understood, architectonic, Reason's prime directive is order; it can't abide danglers or loose ends. Everything has to "fit." To use contemporary (mindless) parlance, we all seek "closure." However, readers who are looking for "closure" in Heidegger look in vain. No one understood better than he that he never reached his destination, a complete revelation of Being, and an exhaustive understanding of human being (Dasein), in particular. His lifelong attitude toward philosophy was that philosophy is and must be an eternal questioning. Unlike the great system-builders of the past, whose metanarratives have worn out from constant use, Heidegger always has something new to reveal, by clearing away, to use Locke's terms, the rubbish that lies in the way of understanding. It all depends upon how you view philosophy. If you see it as a source of entertainment and distraction, then you can ignore Heidegger. But if you take it seriously, and believe that it can, and should, disclose dimensions of the human reality that are not accessible to science, and that we humans, especially since the onset of modernity, have come perilously close to forgetting who and what we are, then Heidegger must be near the top of your list of great thinkers. And having Dreyfus as your guide will make things so much easier, even if not easy. But, as Spinoza once observed, "omnia praeclara tam difficilia quam rara sunt." ("All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.")

There's no getting away from Heidegger; most of the intellectual life of the later 20th century is a series of commentaries on or arguments with Being and Time. But the book is almost as difficult as its reputation would have it. Most of us need some help.

Probably the best short summary of its thesis came from Samuel Johnson: "Depend upon it, Sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully." But Johnson died about 140 years before the book was published, so he didn't actually get to read it. Those of us born after its publication could use a more detailed guide to Heidegger's dense and unwieldy work. This, unfortunately, isn't it, in spite of Dreyfus's decades of teaching and the testimonials on the back cover from Charles Taylor and other luminaries.

Dreyfus, who teaches at UC Berkeley, reduces Being and Time to a neutral quasi-psychology in which "being-there is doing something it makes sense to do given the public situation, and given already taken-over public for-the-sake-of-whiches." And that's all, folks. Dasein (Heidegger's term for us human folk) and the world are knowable only through everyday public practice, and according to Dreyfus the point of Division I of this two-part work is to show how it's possible to get through one's day without thinking about it and how that provides the only basis for knowledge.

After being criticised for his failure to address Division II, Dreyful admitted that he had "overlooked warnings, scattered about in Division I, that the average intelligibility desribed there would later be shown to be an inferior form of understanding." Well, duh. Those aren't hints; they're screaming tirades. Dreyfus not only undervalues the importance of Division II; he is deaf to the emotional character of the whole work, which conveyed as much by its literary qualities as by its argument.

Although he tossed in a few half-hearted denials that he's doing anything more than ontology, Heidegger clearly loathed the world of everydayness, the inauthentic being of the "they," and he longed for its supercession. "Existential analysis," he said, "has the character of doing violence, whether to the claims of the everyday interpretation, or to its complacency and its tranquillized obviousness." (H 311) In retrospect it's clear how this position led to his embrace of Hitler--not that one can read Nazi ideology off from the book, but because its hopes and fears were just those played on so expertly by the Nazis. Heidegger saw Hitler as the truly authentic man who could be the conscience of the nation. (He tried to cast himself in a similar role at Freiburg, with results that would be comical if anything about that time could appear humorous.)

But one doesn't need literary sensitivity to see what's wrong with Dreyfus's Heidegger. Why would young German intellectuals have flocked to his lectures if he were simply showing them that everyday skills were the be-all and end-all? It's simply impossible to imagine this spectacled epistemologist as "the secret king of philosophy," the charismatic magus who captivated the young Hannah Arendt in presenting "the thinking that springs as a passion."

Dreyfus's book contains a long Appendix on Kierkegaard, authenticity, and Division II; but its conclusions are just as bathetically deflationary as the main text. Here, too, Heidegger comes across as a multiculturalist liberal. Authenticity is supposed to make available a salad-bar of "marginal practices," a phrase which appears nowhere in Being and Time and which is not supported by the citations adduced. Instead of a stoic and joyful acceptance of one's fate--one of the themes that leads Heidegger to Nietzsche--Dreyfus sees merely a free choice of commitment from the social resources available and a concomitant choice of a role model like Jesus or Florence Nighingale.

And Dreyfus knew Heidegger. No doubt the sage listened politely to whatever he had to say and took it as further proof that Americans had no culture.

The best secondary source on Heidegger's early philosophy available in English. Sets the standard for clear and forthright assessment of Heidegger's achievement.

Even the Professor himself in his podcast lectures advises to get the William Blattner version first. He said there were many things he was going to change in the next edition of this book.