IEP 405: Phenomenology and Environment

AWAYMAVE - The Distance Mode of MA in Values and the Environment at Lancaster University

Week 3. Heidegger and Dwelling

BACKGROUND NOTES ON HEIDEGGER

Heidegger (1889-1976) was a pupil of Husserl's and takes the key ideas of phenomenology, but questions the extent to which we can apply the epoche and examine the world as correlates of consciousness. Heidegger is sometimes seen as a complete rejection or reinterpretation of Husserl's approach, but others would see what he is doing as a way of questioning and then refining the central method and bringing out things that were there but had not been fully worked though.

What does he focus on and bring out?

Heidegger believes that we have to get out of our centuries old habit of treating the world and ourselves as a set of objects. To restart how to approach the world we have to start where we are and see that our way of being is 'being-in-the-world'. Through an application of the phenomenological method (shaped by his new emphasis) to the question of how we are in the world Heidegger identifies human reality as Dasein (being there) and sets this in the context of Being as such.

Being there and being here are both encapsulated in the meaning of the German word Dasein and for Heidegger it is part of that human reality that we are also the kind of beings who question the nature of Being. Note that the focus is on human existence as the route to understand Being in general. If we were not in some way directed to the question of the meaning of Being, we would not be the route. As he says:

The very asking of this question is an entity's mode of being; and as such it gets its essential character from what is enquired about - namely Being. This entity which each of us is themselves and which includes enquiring is one of the possibilities of its Being we shall denote by the term Dasein. p27.

In order to progress the enquiry Heidegger uses phenomenology, but as I have said with the attention shifted from consciousness, as carrying abstract experience, to the world as experienced. In beginning to describe the world as experience the glaring aspect that is revealed is how situated we are.
To understand Being we have to understand Dasein and to understand Dasein we have to focus on the life-world and it is the life-world that Heidegger thinks Western philosophy has ignored and contributed to covering up. When we explore this relationship we see that the essential way we have of being-in-the-world is to care. We are not detached observers but involved participants. One of the pieces of analysis that Heidegger does is to show how our normal relationship to things in the world is not that of unconnected items but as instruments we use and thus he makes a distinction between things being ready-to-hand as in our primary way of being and present-at-hand when considered abstractly in a secondary or derivative way. Western philosophy treats the world and ourselves as if present-to-hand and this conceals our real relationship of being-in-the-world.

I used an analogy in the class which may or may not help. I drew a distinction between the way in which two TV chefs present making something. Delia Smith and most TV cooks tend to have all the ingredients measured out in little bowls next to where they are going to use them. This you might call ready to hand as in 'available and prepared'. But in fact, I would say that the ingredients have been made present-at-hand by the action of them having been taken out of normal cooking mode and presented unrealistically. My assumption here is that nobody actually cooks like that - certainly not if they do the washing up as well! Whereas the TV chef Jamie Oliver retrieves the ingredients from the fridge, cupboard, window box or his shopping bag as he is making the dish. In this way he demonstrates an embeddedness in his kitchen with all the tools and ingredients ready-to-hand such that the whole kitchen becomes, as Heidegger says, a practical totality.

The other aspect of Heidegger's work that needs to be in an introductory overview is the way we are 'being-for-others'. The world for H. is always the world I share with others. However, just as we can think of the world as if it is present-at-hand, rather than primarily, ready-to-hand, so we can maintain an inauthentic stance towards others. Heidegger draws attention particularly to the inauthentic stance driven by conformity to what he calls the 'they' (das Man). We think of doing something because of what 'they' will think - could be friends, neighbours,- but the sense is better communicated by the ambiguous 'they' and a kind of impulse from everyone to averageness. As H. says:

We take pleasure and enjoy ourselves as they take pleasure; we read, see and judge about literature as they see and judge; …we find shocking what they find shocking. The they, which is nothing definite, and which all are, though not as a sum, prescribes the kind of being of everydayness. p.165.

Thus H. develops a criticism of mass society and its action of destroying authentic selfhood. One year in the class we had an interesting discussion around this and agreed that we have different reasons for conforming and some could be freely chosen and so not deny our selfhood but are practical means to maintain an easy life so that our expression of selfhood could be fully articulated elsewhere.

The treatment of the inauthentic as a response to 'the they' gives us another aspect of Dasein that of its freedom and future directedness. We understand ourselves in terms of our future possibilities. This makes it possible to make and remake ourselves because the closest thing we have to an essence is our freedom. However, note that, as Heidegger points out, it is much more likely that we are actually engaged in inauthentic living even as we engage in such a remaking.

Why do we live inauthentically?

Apart from the 'they' as a kind of mechanism we are also tempted to avoid authentic living because it puts us into a state of anxiety. This state of anxiety comes from the now unconcealed possibility of our own death. For H. Dasein is then also a being-toward-death. It is interesting to note that a reported affect of near death experiences and also people with terminal illnesses are sometimes gripped by a sense of seeing what is important and a letting go of everyday concerns that are not part of who they really are.

There is a web site here with a useful chronology and many useful links for H.

Dwelling

The aspect of Heidegger's work that will be our focus on this module is his idea of dwelling and particularly the attendant notion of authenticity. It is this idea of dwelling that many contemporary writers on place pick up on and use for various purposes.

Let us begin with a primary text and just have a go at reading Heidegger and getting at least a feel for this idea as he presents it.

Now read Heidegger's essay 'Building, Dwelling, Thinking' which is available as a word document on the discussion site. You might like to add some space for notes after each paragraph before printing it out.

Exercise

take your notes per paragraph and now arrange them into the argument (or another way of setting out the central claim(s)) that is/are being made in the paper.

Heidegger's writing style is really quite something and philosophers vary greatly on what that something actually is! I find the best approach is to pretty much skim through it once to get the overall shape and not worry about understanding particular passages and then re read it more carefully with that useful note taking practice of writing a sentence or a few words per paragraph that encapsulates the essence of what you think that paragraph was about.

It is a complex piece of writing and if you are new to Heidegger there is probably a lot that sounds strange. (if you are completely stuck you might like to just read through the short extract from Stefanovich and the chapter from Mugerauer that are the first 2 parts of your reader and then come back to this.)

I have put my paragraph by paragraph summary on the discussion site.

My Overall summary

To summarise the piece as a whole I would say that it is explaining the nature of dwelling and its relationship to building and this explanation brings out how sparing (caring for and appreciating/being aware of the reality of a thing) is fundamental to that relationship. In the first section the crucial point is his idea of the fourfold and this encompasses explaining the nature of four aspects that are all essential to dwelling and also reiterates the interconnectedness of all these aspects. We might want to question his divisions, present new aspects, or get rid of or combine his, but the crucial point remains that dwelling is about more than passing time in a place and it is something to do with being human that makes this the case. The fourfold also gives us a clear picture of how something can be hidden and revealed and how thinking can play a part in the revealing. Also embedded in this is the notion of things having a real nature, as opposed to how we might think of them, and that we can get at that real nature by thinking in the manner of the thing.

The second section develops the building theme of the piece by rejecting a normal understanding of this process to reveal what we are really doing when we build. By bringing out the nurturing/growing aspect of building, alongside the idea of construction, we see building as part of the process of dwelling. I think this also is suggestive of ideas such as appropriate or sensitive building, for example, building that is site specific. However this section also contains an even more radical aspect by claiming that it is only in building that space is brought about. Heidegger makes a distinction between the space that is created through location, which itself only comes into being with respect to building, and the more abstract notion of "space". I don’t think this is necessarily an attempt to rewrite or even question physics, but just driving home the point that space for us is the space of here and, at a stretch, near and far. This is our starting point for thinking about space in which more abstract conceptions have their roots. (note the similarity to Husserl on mathematization.)

Thinking as the other part of the title comes up in three places: the first implicitly as a part of explaining us as mortals; then in the striking observation about thinking of a distant place and in a sense the thinking putting us there; and in concluding the essay thinking returns as an essential component of dwelling such that it is a necessary part of the constant activity of finding out how to dwell which is a part of dwelling itself.

Think
what questions did the piece suggest to you? Make a note of them if you didn't do so along the way.

A question that jumps out at me, particularly when trying to untangle the location/place idea, is where this leaves places with no human habitation or action such as building? but this question comes about because I am hanging on to a category that needs deconstructing further. I think the process of deconstructing would entail reconceptualising what we have come to call ‘the’ environment.

From a phenomenological standpoint this ‘the’ makes no sense at all. There is environing, be it mine or a giant redwood’s, but what would it mean for there to be ‘the’ environment? This can sound like an very anthropocentric move, to shift to just speaking only of environing. It sounds as if we are denying the world any kind of separate being. But I don’t think this is the case exactly, what it does do is deny us a separation from that by which we are environed, there is no separate entity that looks out on a world from a standpoint that could be other than its environing.

Web notes by Isis Brook updated March 2005