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Martin HeideggerBeing And Time
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1927A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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BetaDivision 1, Chapter 5, Part B
Division 1: “Preparatory Fundamental Analysis of Dasein”
Division 1, Chapter 5, Section 35 Summary
Heidegger said that to understand the they, and hence Dasein in its initial and most common state, it was necessary to understand understanding. This was to be done via its principal modes: moods and discourse. This is because it is the absence of self-understanding that defines the they. Such a process would indicate two things. First, it would show what, more properly, the nature of they-being is, because by showing what self-understanding is, we could show what it is not. Second, this process would intimate how to escape the they, and how thereby, in our lives, to understand it and avoid inauthenticity.
With Heidegger’s account of discourse and mood, he seems to have accomplished these aims; the means to understanding, and hence escaping, the they have ostensibly been provided. Moods, as seen, can in theory disclose the world via its breakdown. This is especially the case regarding the emotion of angst, which reveals the uncanniness of the they-world. Discourse can help spread this understanding, or even encourage those moods that facilitate self-understanding. Consider in this role, for example, the text of Being and Time itself, or certain kinds of poetry.
As such, the outstanding question is why we are still for the most part stuck in the they-self, despite potentially liberating moods and discourse being integral to our being-in-the-world. Heidegger’s answer is clear. The reason is because there is a mood and a type of discourse belonging to the they, and it covers over, and suppresses, the discourse and mood necessary for self-understanding.
Such a type of discourse is defined by what Heidegger calls “idle talk.” This has its origins in the very nature of discourse itself, for discourse necessarily contains “average intelligibility” (212). For one person to be able to communicate with another, there must be at least the possibility that one can understand someone “even if the hearer does not bring himself into such a kind of Being towards what the discourse is about as to have a primordial understanding of it” (212). In other words, language always contains shortcuts. We can understand another’s speech in more general or abstract terms without necessarily having experienced or been affected by the subject matter of what is said.
In a community where everyone had self-understanding, such shortcuts would be only temporary, or localized, or they would be offset by other functions of language encouraging, or facilitating, original experience. The structures of our everyday world and being-with, however, are always encouraging a passing over of our true being and a blindness to the they, meaning this element of language is going to become pronounced. In that case, a specific process is set in train in which what is focused on more and more in discourse is not the understanding proper, and its relation to experience, but “What is said-in-the-talk as such” (212). That is, the substance of talk is increasingly sidelined in favor of achieving as much second-hand, general understanding as possible.
Such a process is accelerated as growing numbers of people pass this understanding along. The nature of discourse becomes so dominated by idle, increasingly groundless chatter that we forget it should have any relationship to genuine understanding in the first place. All Dasein are, on entering the world, subject to this. As Heidegger says, this way of interpreting things “is one into which Dasein has grown in the first instance” (213). We find ourselves in a world where others communicate with us, and discourse is used almost solely in this way. Thus, it seems entirely natural, as well as necessary, to engage in such idle talk ourselves.
Division 1, Chapter 5, Sections 36-38 Summary
The hegemony of idle talk is perpetuated and guaranteed by another related phenomenon. This is “curiosity.” Since idle talk alienates us from any more fundamental relation to the world, any given phenomenon can be of only passing interest. Combined with a desire to keep up with the chatter of the they, we are led to seek “the excitement of continual novelty and changing encounters” (216). That is, we perpetually pursue the new and exotic to compensate for a lack of interest in what is closest. Witness the obsession with latest trends in music, literature, and philosophy. This pursuit has the effect of consummating the power of idle talk. In a bid to find more novelty, and to escape what average thought has already rendered banal, curiosity seizes upon anything not yet taken over by this mode of discourse. It thus threatens even that which had seemed to be a source of authentic understanding.
Division 1, Chapter 5, Part B Analysis
If part A of Chapter 5 offered hope, part B offers cause for despair. The menace of the they, subdued with the account of moods and discourse, returns, but now seemingly stronger and irresistible. As revealed with the discussion of idle talk, its tentacles reach out into everything: “In it, out of it, and against it, all genuine understanding, interpreting, and communicating, all re-discovering and appropriating anew, are performed” (213). In other words, we exist in a state of what Heidegger calls “Fallenness” (220). The world of inauthenticity is something in which we are always necessarily marred and entangled. It is not something from which we can ever, in some pure and final sense, be free, for even the means for trying to enact that escape are polluted by the thing they hope to avoid.
Nowhere is this point more evident than in the case of philosophy. One might think that since understanding is the way to resist the they, and philosophy pursues understanding, then philosophy would offer us a way out. As Heidegger points out, in universities the world over, “there is, of course, serious preoccupation with philosophy and its problems” (Heidegger, Martin. What is called Thinking?, trans. by F. D. Wieck and J. G. Gray. London: Harper and Row. 1968), so we would expect a few of them to be doing this.
For Heidegger, though, this is not the case, because philosophy, too, is entangled in idle talk and the they. It is, we can say, conducted in the wrong mood. The mood and attitude of university philosophy, for instance, means that no matter what the subject matter, each phenomenon is turned into an object of idle talk and curiosity. As seen in the world of academic conferences, there is an attitude of appealing to a generic public expectation. The philosopher acts and speaks as a professional philosopher is expected to. One must present oneself as being knowledgeable and as knowing about the latest developments. One must not upset the underlying, and unspoken, conventions of that world, and it would be absurd to, as Heidegger says, “be amazed to the point of not understanding” (216), or to admit to being “perplexed.” Equally, it would be absurd to ask the question of whether genuine understanding was taking place.
As such, philosophy, as standardly practiced, does not let us escape the they. In fact, it helps enshrine the kind of ontology that makes a true uncovering of our being-in-the-world, and of the they, impossible. Because of its attitude, it overlooks our non-presence, and fallenness, to begin with. This overlooking is then reinforced through a self-perpetuating tradition that makes its own view seem obvious and any alternative nonsensical. Its claims to be open-minded and interested in all perspectives only makes this worse, helping cover over even more thoroughly a way out of absorption in claiming that everything has been accounted for.
What, though, of authentic philosophy? What about philosophy done in the right critical mood? Heidegger does not broach this issue explicitly in this text. However, he does discuss this in a later work, What is Called Thinking? (1952), which is an elaboration on ideas about the they introduced in Being and Time. Specifically, he talks about Nietzsche’s philosophy and his despairing cry, “The wasteland grows” (Heidegger, Martin. What is called Thinking?, trans. by F. D. Wieck and J. G. Gray. London: Harper and Row. 1968). The title of a poem from Dithyrambs of Dionysus (1891), it expresses the same attempt found with the “last man” in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1885). That is, it has the same goal of breaking our complacent absorption in the familiar, comfortable world of modern culture. It warns of the ever-encroaching domination of the “last men,” who will eventually destroy all “wilderness,” or sources of alternative existence.
Still, Heidegger claims that even Nietzsche’s cry, and its authentic invocation to break free, can become a part of idle, average talk and understanding. This would deepen the hopelessness of our position still further, and the proliferation of Nietzsche themed conferences, societies, and radio programs suggests this might already be happening. However, the very existence of an authentic philosopher like Nietzsche implies an alternative is possible. In our ability to understand him, or Heidegger, at all there is an indication that the domination of the they is not absolute. It also intimates that genuine philosophy can play a role in the struggle against it. This struggle of true philosophy and understanding will rely, as we will see, on an experience that is both unexpected and deeply personal.
