Hello Nathan,

Considered from a hermeneutic perspective, human understanding is fundamentally or ‘primordially’ exemplified by using equipment, thus in the philosopher Heidegger’s example, a hammer. We can be said to understand its usage. Visibly incorporated in habituated behaviour, understanding implicitly or tacitly anticipates and actualizes activity subject to public standards of achievement. From what horizon of assumptions (e.g. that construction of a dwelling is worthwhile) does hammering proceed?

Such habitual, hence little reflected on, comprehending of our material circumstances involves knowing or understanding how to act appropriately. This embodied perception of surroundings precedes secondary reflective or analytic propositional knowing that. ‘Performative’ knowing is distinct from ‘declarative’ asserting (Brown, J.S. and P. Duguid (2001) ‘Knowledge and Organization: A Social-Practice Perspective’, Organization Science 12(2): 198-213, p 199). Heidegger is in both cases concerned with philosophically analysing or achieving a distanciated account of everyday familiar understanding, our primordiial mode of being as Dasein.

Regards,

Tony Wilson

In The Question Concerning Technology, Heidegger is concerned that we have become a standing in reserve. He points to the term 'human resources' as an example of the trend towards commoditizing Dasein through Dasein's capabilities. In Building Dwelling and Thinking he questions whether, for example, the dwelling is a place where Dasein is disclosed. If one is identified with the dwelling, take Downton Abbey as an example, one has fettered the horizon of Dasein's being to the dwelling. How self-limiting of disclosure is that? However, what is it like to dwell and how does that disclose Dasein even in the Abbey?

The companion question is whether one's work is a better disclosure of being. He uses poetry to consider an alternative to place as disclosure. In technology, the human effort to create the technology is one of the four causes of the thing, but its disclosure of Dasein after completion may become invisible. The first Macintosh line was signed by the development team but inside a sealed box. Who signs the Boeing aircraft? On the other hand, we may know the architect of the famous building. Where I believe that Heidegger was going was towards a concept of disclosure of Dasein's being that becomes more evident the closer we approach the idea of art, and in perhaps the most abstract, poetry as an example. However, there is no bright line but a continuum of disclosure from the least in the commodity called hammer to perhaps something much more disclosable in the brevity of the most thoughtful Haiku.

The technical evolution of humankind has caused automatism without orientation, which has forgotten or denies the truthfulness of the initial sources of human existence and humanity, said Heidegger. By applying phenomenological means in an everyday context, human being has access to his own real being as the unfolding of openness and freeness. Human being is characterized by the definition of Dasein; this single-minded notion of Dasein rejects the sphere of intersubjectivity outside the philosophical scope, and destroys both rationalism and the rational ideal of action. The structure of existence indicates an absolute foundation in the things of the world, where the common basis lies for the Being of Dasein and of the world. Dasein means Being-in-the-world; this is not so much a lifeless characterization of human being as a lifeless abstraction. Being a Zeug or a Ding (thing) means imposing passivity, finitude and Geworfenheit (throwness) on human life, parallel with facing the human eternal fundamental nature of Being-towards-death (Heidegger, 1996, pp. 135-137, 321-338, 376-378).   

 The term Geworfenheit reflects the fundamental and unalterable conditions of human life. Implicit Geworfenheit prevents human freedom from being a spiritual project that can be accomplished by means of human activity. Human freedom depends upon the phenomenon of Einbruch (breakthrough) (Heidegger, 1959, pp. 144-148 and 175-179). Freedom per se is understood as negative freedom at its starting point – namely, either as Geworfenheit or as freedom-from, which is a conclusively settled and precisely limited freedom. Although many people in modern times enjoy freedom from want and from fear of want, they are neither fully alive, nor is their future assured. Moreover, the ideal of self-knowledge has been replaced by a fatalistic notion such as Geworfenheit. Consequently, ethics has lost its value since it is impossible to give any ethical meaning to culture. What matters for human being is how he looks toward his end, whether he has the courage to anticipate the whole of his existence, which fully reveals only upon death. Faced with this ultimate reality, Dasein can develop an “impassioned freedom towards death,” which dissolves the illusions of the entire humanity (Ibid., pp. 295-311). This means that human being is primarily concerned with the experience of anxiety and the relationship to death; only in them does the meaning of being manifest itself. If the original relationship of human being to the world is anxiety, then knowledge is also a mode of anxiety, because knowledge is the mode of being of the Being. The modern ideal of human freedom faces the primordial supremacy of fate and necessity, and it comes into being through growing in the cold soil of an idealized death.

 If the notion of human being is reached by the self-analysis of the relation to his own being, then it is closely linked with the concept of existence. Human existence, which is neither the primary nor the ultimate philosophical problem for human being, refers fundamentally to ontological being – namely, thinking about being. Ontologically, being for Dasein is the understanding of being and existence. Existence itself is “being-in-the-world,” that is an essentially dynamic way of existing, as well as transcending oneself. The paradox of this structure, in which existence in view of itself presents itself as essentially ecstatic, is the very paradox of existence and of time. Yet in order to notice this paradox, it is necessary to develop the structure of transcendence of this in-esse in the world that has been established. The difference between the subject and the object is not determined by the relationship between them in knowledge, but in the practical meeting of human being with things. The nature of human being is “anxious,” whereas the being of things is to be matter for his “anxiety.”

 The beings in the world, treated by human being, are not simply things but instruments (Zeug-Werkzeug), which are either prepared or unprepared for his use; this being of the beings is also their true being for humankind, although the reality of beings is not dependent upon human being (Heidegger, 1996, pp. 68-74, 354-355). If human being must live a life of independence and full responsibility to himself, to his being, then he must be an independent self and realize his true essence in life – namely, to be with himself and not merely with things. Every human being’s independent self is the self at the depths of his being that is hidden from him in daily life, in which he spends his time with things and other people. Human being must liberate himself from any deceptive connection and turn to himself, in order to understand his being in all its possibilities and limitations and to live a life arising from such understanding. This form of life possesses complete unity of truth in the theoretical and practical sense.

 Human path to radiance passes through various obstacles, with the purpose of reaching the ultimate experience of unity, eventually as care (Sorge). In care, existence, facticity and falling (Verfallen) form a unity of states through which human being, partaking of his own nature as openness and experiencing a falling akin to that of the flying dreamer, enter the openness that allows him to reveal being himself. This manifestation is equated with the experience of pure time or timeliness (Zeitlichkeit) (Heidegger, 1996, pp. 321-328). Human being touches upon the original forcefulness of time through his fallenness, which reminds him that his essence is composed of being “outside of oneself.” Directed toward a “horizon,” his essence forms an elation stretching across the open expanse toward which remoteness as such is outside itself (Ibid. pp. 39-41 and 235).

 Heidegger is “telling the very same story that so many reactionary thinkers in Europe had been telling and repeating since the closing years of the Nineteenth Century: a story which … begins in nostalgia and concludes with a condemnation of modernity” (Levin, 1993, p. 187). Heidegger’s refutation and severe critique of modern culture and its unstable foundations reveals its own non-rational (or irrational) volcanic soil. If the great questions of ontology and existentialism find their accurate and authentic answers far from technological-scientific reality and rational thinking, then the basis of modern reality is only an upper layer of a deeper, older and more powerful stratum – namely, the stratum of myth and religious thought. In this way, the vulnerable, insecure reality is driven by a vicious, determined and irrational consciousness. Heidegger’s notion of Geworfenheit refers to the passive existence of human being, who “regards himself as a being, confined within the historical conditions of his existence, a being, who can understand these conditions, but not change them … The proper understanding of the relationship between spirit or culture and life is lost and man confines his understanding of himself simply to exploring the structures of the immediate conditions of his existence without seeing himself as the creator of these structures and the developer of them into the forms of cultural order” (Verene, 1978, p. 14). Heidegger’s analysis of human being and human existence reflects the weakness and helplessness of human being, as well as human suffering and humiliation. His saddened prognosis of modern human being refers to the crisis of culture by implantation of a self-destructive impetus.

 This answer is an extract from my book Symbolic Forms as the Metaphysical Groundwork for the Organon of the Cultural Sciences (2014), Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, vols. 1 & 2, pp. 927

Thanks all for your comments!

/best

Nathan Lakew, Thank you for raising this question. This discussion has really given me inspiration towards completing my Ph.D work on Heideggerian Critique of Virtual Reality Technology.