Reflections on Being and Time 3: Formal Morality

Heidegger is at his most amusing, I think, when he denies what he’s patently doing. ?In Being and Time, influenced (if Hubert Dreyfus and Michial Farmer don’t lead me astray) by Kierkegaard and Buber, Heidegger does spend a fair bit of time talking about certain ways of Dasein?(being-there/existential being) that, despite his repeated denials of doing evaluative ethics, nonetheless start sounding like Kierkegaardian condemnations of modernity. ?They do rely on Heidegger’s structure of being (in other words, read yesterday’s post first), but they’re undeniably interested in pointing to ways of being that are worse than others.

To set up the structure of Heidegger’s reflections, dealing with other people always must involve a different disposition towards Dasein than one has towards ready-to-hand equipment and merely present-at-hand objects. ?Because every other person is also Dasein, the sort of being that takes a stand on its own being (more on that in a moment), other people, ontologically, can never be mere objects in my world; they’re always neighbors in a common world. (Heidegger does not use the Christian vocabulary of neighbor, but this is not a commentary but a reflection upon Being and Time.)? Heidegger’s philosophy makes solipsism almost unimaginable. ?But these are not free-floating Cartesian subjects beholding an inert objective world of atoms and elements; rather, everyone involved, because we are beings with pasts and futures, always takes a stand on being that’s already constituted by the world and is part of a world. ?Our technologies and our practices and our memories form the irreducible being on which we take our stand, either by falling to the complex work that the world would set before us or by being in the world in some other way that, inevitably, fits the world into which we are thrown, even when we stand against parts of it. ?(The rebel, as Dante reminds us, in this world never severs relationship to the power against whom the rebel rebels.? And as Dante reminds us, that can be good or bad depending on the power against whom one rebels.)? Thus there is never any absolute separation-from-the-world; there are only different ways of being-in-the-world.

Taking that structure into the relationships that constitute morality, Heidegger points to a certain range of Kierkegaard-flavored inauthentic social realities that make a fair bit of sense inside the framework that he builds (I’m using Macquarrie’s translation of these labels, knowing full well that I’m relying on someone else’s German):

• Anxiety is the fear, not of something in-the-world, but of being itself.? The anxious person, attempting to flee the reality that one must stand on one’s own being, always takes a stand on her or his own being but does so in privative manners, experiencing the world through one’s own inward-turning.
• Idle Talk happens when talk, always ready-to-hand, becomes unmoored from the particularities of this or that Dasein’s particular need to communicate something authentic and becomes instead a context within which people, who have no depth of involvement with that-which-they-talk-about, nonetheless form an atmosphere of talk by means of which one can avoid the threatening world in which one more immediately exists.? To quote Macquarrie’s translation, “Idle talk does not have the kind of Being which belongs to consciously passing off something as something else.? The fact that something has been said groundlessly, and then gets passed along in further retelling, amounts to perverting the act of disclosing into an act of closing off” (213).
• Curiosity is neither a restful contemplation of the immediate world nor the sort of understanding that one brings to bear on a task at hand but rather a state in which “Dasein lets itself be carried along solely by the looks of the world; in this kind of Being, it concerns itself with becoming rid of itself as Being-in-the-world and rid of its Being alongside that which, in the closest everyday manner, is ready-to-hand” (216).? Looking everywhere but contemplating nothing, beholding all but not dealing with none, curiosity allows a Dasein to be in-the-world without ever having to confront it theoretically or actively.
• Ambiguity happens when one lives in a world full of idle talkers and curious lookers.? When anyone can use the same ready-to-hand tools of talk, irrespective of whether that talk is grounded in real concern or ungrounded and idle, and when anyone can use the same ready-to-hand vocabularies irrespective of whether a given Dasein has real know-how or insight or mere curiosity, the intellectual atmosphere becomes one in which one can never tell until it’s too late where insight is and ain’t.? (If this sounds like the Internet, it only shows that Heidegger still has something to say.)

That’s not an exhaustive catalogue (though some of you might already be exhausted), but it does give a certain flavor for this morality (which Heidegger will not call morality) that makes sense in terms of Heidegger’s ontology.? According to Michial, who knows Kierkegaard far better than I do (which is to say he knows Kierkegaard), the Danish influence is undeniable.

To return to Heidegger-is-not-a-Christian trope, not only does he return over and over to a denial that he is evaluating anything, but he also assumes that in any of these cases, the better way to be-there (Dasein) is the road of authenticity, self-making in terms of one’s world rather than following the dictates of Man (a word whose analog, also man, I learned when I learned Old English and whose range of modern English equivalents runs from “people” to the generic “they” to “one” to “everybody”).? Although a certain man-ethos is inevitably a part of social life (e.g. when we eat at roughly the same times, wait our turn in line, and recycle our newspapers rather than throwing them in the neighbor’s yard), Heidegger always warns readers that the better way to exist is as self-made in the important things in life.

That said, the man-structure of immorality is a goldmine for Christian reflection, from the grand “banality of evil” of Hannah Arendt to the grandly banal “peer pressure” that’s a staple for youth ministers.? Moreover, the structure of man (forgive me, German readers, if I should be capitalizing that consistently–pretend I’m using the Old English rather than the German word) provides a helpful springboard for ecclesiology–assuming, as Christian theology often does, that Church stands as a body politic in its own right and a culture in which cult cultivates caritas (I just had to do that bad alliterative riff), a reflection on Heidegger’s being-in-the-world should ring as a golden opportunity to start thinking about being-in-the-world-but-not-of-the-world, and since taking a stand on one’s being always happens in-the-world, rich Christian practices of prayer and eucharist start to taste much better than flat cognitivist “worldview” thinking that often passes for “apologetics” in Christian catechesis.

To return for a moment to the New Testament (which I said I’d do), when the epistle of James talks about taming the tongue and in the same breath counsels that real piety is care of widows and orphans (that’s chapter one, if you want to look it up), and when the text goes on to say that faith without works is as useless as a screen door on a submarine (that’s in James, right?), we Christians in a post-Kierkegaardian age should hear an anticipation of this sort of thinking, a warning against contributing to the atmosphere of ambiguity that extends to teach us that a life of genuine care for the helpless is the best sort of piety towards the God of the Exodus and finally a warning that talk of faithfulness without concern for those other Daseins is ultimately idle talk.? In other words, although I’m not going to stir up the Calvinists of the world by saying that “works save” or anything else so foolish (though I will note that the Torah of Moses comes not as a guilt-inducing prelude to but only in the wake of God’s delivering the Hebrews through water at the Red Sea), nonetheless a Christianity that is ultimatley just a pale imitation of celebrity culture, a marketing of a contextless “message” to bored “consumers,” cannot ultimately rise above this sort of criticism.? That’s not to say that folks who try to live faithfullly (which could stand, I think, as a good analogue to Heidegger’s “authentically”) are going to exist in-the-world entirely consistently, but it is to say that asking how to get bored butts in the soft pews might not be the best way to think about Christian discipleship.

Before I finish this segment I should try to practice Christian gratitude and say that I would not be ready to plunge into the time part of Being and Time were it not for the people in my own story who taught me and are teaching me to read hard books. ?When I read a book this hard I have to remember my high school English teachers, Sweeney and Kellogg and Cumberland; Dr. Kenneson, who taught me to read ancient and postmodern philosophy at Milligan; and Dr. Norris, whose Theology and Society class introduced me to Heidegger by going backwards through John Milbank. ?I also should not forget that Michial Farmer challenges me to be brilliant by setting up impossibly high expectations for my brilliance (sometimes in public) and the podcasts of Hubert Dreyfus, whose experience reading (and meeting) Heidegger have led my eyes to the key phrases in the text.

Alright, now that I’ve thanked the academy (hey! ?That’s a joke on a couple levels!), tomorrow’s post will deal with truth in Heidegger. ?Thanks to all of you who are reading, and do leave comments where you think I’ve missed the point or where I’ve been helpful. ?I do have a terribly fragile ego, you know.