Abstract
The following essay compares and contrasts Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time with an earlier lecture course that he delivered in the Winter Semester of 1919/2020 entitled Basic Problems of Phenomenology. Heidegger says explicitly that the pre-phenomenal basis for his analysis in Being and Time is “entities” in their equipmental totality. He calls these the “preliminary theme” for his analysis of Dasein. While the analytic of Dasein is the first step in posing the question of Being, the pre-phenomenal basis for the analytic of Dasein is, he says, “entitities” or “equipment”. I argue that this can lead to certain misunderstandings, especially when he talks about nature and human relationships. In Basic Problems, Heidegger’s focus is not on “entities” or “equipment” but rather on experiences. In this earlier work, he is trying to develop a language that can capture the intensity of lived-experience, suggesting an experiential vibrancy to Dasein that is implicit but not thematized in Being and Time. I aim to show that while Heidegger turns away from the term “life” in Being and Time, his understanding of Dasein can still draw on the intensity and immediacy of experience so prominent in this early lecture course.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Change history
05 February 2020
The original version of this article unfortunately contained a mistake.
05 February 2020
The original version of this article unfortunately contained a mistake.
Notes
There are two lecture courses from Heidegger on basic problems of phenomenology with almost identical titles. The present essay refers to the first course, GA 58 Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie, which Heidegger delivered in the Winter Semester of 1919/2020. The second, later course, GA 24 Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie, was delivered in the Summer Semester of 1927 and was translated into English by Albert Hofstadter as The Basic Problems of Phenomenology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982).
Andrew Mitchell calls our attention to this problem, calling the spatiality of Dasein in Being and Time a “space of equipmental efficiency,” Heidegger Among the Sculptors (Mitchell 2010: 3). He concludes that “It would seem that Dasein’s space has the makings of an ideal, frictionless workshop” (Mitchell 2010: 7). This is the case because in Being and Time, Heidegger enters the analytic of Dasein through a discussion of entities in their equipmental totality.
It is important to note that in this essay, my focus is on what Heidegger says in this lecture course about the intensity and immediacy of life-experience. But as Ted Kisiel points out, and as is evident from the lecture course itself, Heidegger is interested here not just in experience but in the origin of experience. Kisiel writes that this lecture course “brings the clarification that the theme of phenomenology is not simply factic life—this is the comprehensive domain divided by all the other sciences—but life as arising from the origin, in its ‘primal leap’ into the factic. Factic life is thus pursued in an entirely new direction. Phenomenology wants to find the origin of factic life,” (Kisiel 1995: 117). My focus on lived-experience should not diminish the importance of this sense of origin.
Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1927, 1953, 1993), tr. by J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson as Being and Time (New York: Harper Collins, 1962), 72/46–47. Hereafter referred to parenthetically in the text as BT. The citation here identifies the English pagination first and then the German pagination second, after the slash mark.
This text is GA 61 Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles: Einführung in die phänomenologische Forschung, ed. Walter Bröcker and Käte Bröcker-Oltmanns (Frankfurt am main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1985), translated as Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle: Initiation into Phenomenological Research, tr. Richard Rojcewicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001).
I have not found in the footnotes to Being and Time an account of the use of quotation marks in this context. Indeed, the use of quotation marks here seems inconsistent. For example, the term “environing nature” (Umweltnatur) has single quotation marks in the paragraph quoted here and then no quotation marks on the next page of the text, where it is Italicized.
Note that Heidegger’s language in this passage is almost identical to the language that he uses in GA 58 Basic Problems of Phenomenology. Here he speaks of the difference between the “flowers of the hedgerow” and the “botanist’s plants” while in Basic Problems he speaks of the difference between “a meadow overflowing with flowers” and the “botanical-scientific treatises about these plants”. See my discussion of this below. This points to an attempt in Being and Time to take account of this difference using the language of the ready-to-hand and the present-at-hand.
For that matter, it is possible to attribute a first-person authority to Dasein without adopting the Cartesian subject and the subject-object distinction that follows from it. Steven Crowell finds a notion of transcendental subjectivity in Dasein’s potential for authenticity. When the they-self collapses, then Dasein takes its own standpoint, assuming a position of first-person authority, but what Crowell describes is closer to an existential subjectivity than a Cartesian one—and note that Crowell places the term subjectivity in scare quotes. The breakdown of the they-self “is equivalent to providing phenomenological access to ‘subjectivity’ as the condition of possibility for authentic selfhood-a condition that has more in common with what Kierkegaard identified as ‘inwardness’ than it does the Cartesian stream of Erlebnisse that we share with higher animals” (Crowell 2005: 125). One may disagree with Crowell’s claim that we find a transcendental subjectivity in Being and Time, but in any case, his is an account that supports the notion of first-person authority but is aimed at going beyond a Cartesian philosophy of consciousness and the epistemological problems that phenomenology was trying to avoid. By focusing on lived-experiences, Heidegger is not making an epistemological claim about our consciousness of experiences. Rather, he is looking at what Kisiel calls “expressions of sense”. Kisiel writes, “For the self-world in factic life is not a thing nor even an I in the epistemological sense, but rather a significance to be understood” (Kisiel 1995: 121).
See my analysis of how Heidegger’s lectures in Basic Problems are an attempt to ground theory and the sciences in factical human life, Chapter 1, especially pages 35–41 (Campbell 2012).
Martin Heidegger, Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1992), tr. by Scott M. Campbell as Basic Problems of Phenomenology, Winter Semester 1919/1920 (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 26/32. Hereafter referred to parenthetically in the text as BPP. The citation here identifies the English pagination first and then the German pagination second, after the slash mark.
I am following Ben Crowe here by translating Zugespitztheit as “intensifying-concentration.” Crowe finds some ambiguity in this term: it indicates the uniqueness of one’s individuality but it also has a richer sense to it suggesting an “ideal of individuality.” For Crowe, there is warrant to restricting the use of this term to the second meaning. See Crowe 2006: 151. See a fuller discussion of this ambiguity below in footnote 16.
Crowe writes, “moments of intensified reflection on life are not necessarily instances of the ‘theoretical attitude’ at work. Heidegger is interested in a more immediate kind of familiarity with life, which, he suggests, can be detected in autobiographies and in religious confessions” (Crowe 2006: 31).
One could also argue that an experience is not a thing, and Kisiel makes just such a claim, writing that “Life experiences are not things, but expressive formations of the tendencies of concrete life-situations” (Kisiel: 120). While I am sympathetic to this position, even on Kisiel’s own account, life experiences are “expressive formations,” which makes them sound like things. I think that an experience is a thing, at least in Heidegger’s sense of Seiendes, that is, it is a being or entity. It is ontic rather than ontological, and we can speak of an experience as “what happened,” but I do not think it is necessary to resolve this question in the context of this paper. My point is simply that experiences are less objective than objects or entities, the “Things” in Being and Time, even their equipmental totality.
Kisiel, who originally translated Kenntnisnehmen as “taking-cognizance,” describes it as life’s initial attempt to take account of factical experience. He looks at the three characters of significance that Heidegger outlines in this course (significance, self-sufficiency, and expression) and explains that these are not “a conceptual net for generalization” but rather “the basis for understanding life in its own expressive formation.” Kisiel continues, “We see this especially in the very first moment of taking-cognizance (Kenntnisnahme) of that factic life in which we find ourselves absorbed, the very first step toward articulating our factic experience” (Kisiel 1995: 120). I think that this sense of initial commencement is important. For Heidegger, to take-notice of an experience is an initial, almost casual, attempt to give an account of what has happened, but even this initial step has philosophical importance because it remains close to the original and thus immediate experience.
In his reading, van Buren’s analysis is quite poetic: “Persons are personifications of being, in and through whom the intentional rays of the worlding and Ereignis of the world refract and intensify into a myriad of eye-opening moments, twinklings-of-an-eye, looks, expressions, styles, facets” (van Buren 1994: 293). It is noteworthy that the poetic, rhetorical language employed by both van Buren and Kisiel are indicative of the intensity of lived-experience that Heidegger is trying to express in this lecture course.
Commenting on van Buren’s reading of Zugespitztheit, intensifying-concentration, Crowe discusses whether or not this intensifying-concentration of life is a basic feature of human existence, “the phenomenological fact that life is always my life,” or a more exceptional accomplishment of the individual, “the comparatively rare achievement of some kind of ‘accentuation’ of the uniqueness and individuality of life” (Crowe: 151). He places van Buren in the first camp, writing, “Van Buren thus takes the term ‘Zugespitztheit’ to refer to a more or less non-optional feature of human life, rather than a rare achievement or an ideal. Van Buren’s idea is that the incalculable ‘event’ [Ereignis]’ of meaning is played out at the most personal, individual level in the lives of particular men and women” (Crowe 2006: 150). Crowe reaches the conclusion that Zugespitztheit is an ideal of individuality after discerning an ambiguity in Heidegger’s use of the term (noted above in footnote 11). On Crowe’s account, one sense of the term “is supposed to designate a general feature of life,” one which we are familiar with as Jemeinigkeit or “mineness” from Being and Time; the second sense “indicates, albeit vaguely, a kind of life that conforms to some kind of ideal of individuality” (Crowe: 151). Crowe’s reading retains van Buren’s sense that meaning is personal, but he opts for the latter sense of the term, as a rare achievement of one’s individuality, thus situating it within his reading of the origins of authenticity. I am inclined to agree with Crowe that it involves a kind of achievement, but I would also want to retain some of the very ambiguity that Crowe has identified and view that achievement as an intensification or accentuation of a basic feature of human life.
References
Campbell, S. (2012). The early Heidegger’s philosophy of life. New York: Fordham University Press.
Cooper, D. E. (2005). Heidegger on nature. Environmental Values,14(3), 339–351.
Crowe, B. (2006). Heidegger’s religious origins. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Crowell, S. (2005). Subjectivity: Locating the first-person in being and time. In R. Polt (Ed.), Heidegger’s being and time: Critical essays (pp. 117–139). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Dreyfus, H. (1992). Heidegger’s history of the being of equipment. In H. L. Dreyfus & H. Hall (Eds.), Heidegger: A critical reader (pp. 173–185). Oxford: Blackwell.
Figal, G. (2005). Being-with, Dasein-with, and the ‘They’ as the basic concept of unfreedom, from Martin Heidegger: Phänomenologie der Freiheit. In R. Polt (Ed.), Heidegger’s being and time: Critical essays (pp. 105–116). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and time (J. Macquarrie & E. Robinson, Trans.). New York: Harper Collins.
Heidegger, M. (2001). Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles: Einführung in die phänomenologische Forschung. In: ed. W. Bröcker & K. Bröcker-Oltmanns (eds.) (Frankfurt am main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1985) (translated as Phenomenological interpretations of Aristotle: Initiation into phenomenological research, R. Rojcewicz, Trans.). Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Heidegger, M. (2013) Basic problems of phenomenology, Winter Semester 1919/1920 (S. M. Campbell, Trans.). London: Bloomsbury.
Kisiel, T. (1995). The genesis of Heidegger’s being and time. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Mitchell, A. (2010). Heidegger among the sculptors. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Van Buren, J. (1994). The young Heidegger: Rumor of the hidden king. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Campbell, S.M. The Intensity of Lived-Experience in Martin Heidegger’s Basic Problems of Phenomenology (WS 1919/2020): A Comparison to Being and Time. Hum Stud 42, 581–599 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-019-09523-5
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-019-09523-5