On Space and Time Book

Commonly known as the "second draft" of Being and Time, this volume not only covers most of the themes that are to appear in the first division of Being and Time (Daseinanalytik), but also includes a unique "introduction" to phenomenology - actually a "destructive" one.

After a brief review of the situation of philosophy by the end of the 19th century, the author proposes three "fundamental discoveries of phenomenology": intentionality, categorial intuition, and the original sense of the apriori. In Heidegger's eyes, these, rather than Husserl's emphasis on the study on "pure" consciousness, are what preeminently distance phenomenology from other ways of philosophizing. With the doctrine of intentionality, a relation between Dasein and its world and preceding both, the Cartesian picture of the subject-object dichotomy is substantially dissolved. It now becomes clear that the unworldly, isolated subject is but a theoretical construction; for any entity like Dasein to be isolated, its being-in-the-world is already presupposed, albeit sometimes manifesting itself in a privative mode like the independent subject. Categorial intuition then remedies philosophy's obsession with individual empirical objects, broadening the subject matter of intuition - not to be associated with mysticism, but as plain as everyday comportment - to the realm of general categories. The idea here is that any understanding of the particular already presupposed a pre-understanding, not yet articulated but nevertheless functioning, of the categories corresponding to the particular. In a short form: understanding is always an understanding as. This, then, leads to the original sense of the apriori: instead of any appeal to a higher realm of entities, the apriori is actually the horizon within which any perception, judgment or simply practical concern are constituted.

But then Heidegger points out that, despite the originality of these discoveries, phenomenology still bears upon itself a traditional understanding of being, especially of the being of the entity that "has" consciousness. In other words, just because Husserl focuses on the emergence of meanings within the stream of pure consciousness, the being of consciousness as well as of the conscious subject is left unquestioned. For example, the sense of the immanent scarcely get clarified in Husserl's works. In Heidegger's view, this leads phenomenology back to the Cartesian tradition, and ultimately to the Greek notion of being as presence [ousia]. This deficiency naturally calls for a more fundamental investigation on the being of Dasein and the meaning of being in general, which Heidegger takes as his lifelong project.

The main part resembles the first division of Being and Time in terms of structure, although expressions and terminology differ here and there. Significantly, Heidegger does not have the notions of Zuhandensein (ready-to-hand) and Vorhandensein (present-at-hand) here. Based on my previous reading of Being and Time, the following differences are noticeable:

First, in this book Heidegger presents a more concrete characterization of facticity. While in Being and Time he only contrasts facticity, a structure of being of Dasein, to factuality, the totality that is discovered within a certain framework of positive science, here he also claims explicitly that facticity is a correlation. This confronts the popular interpretation of facticity as identical to "bare nature", the nature that is not yet idealized by natural sciences, the ultimate inscrutability of what is simply "out there". Although Heidegger admits that nature is an incomprehensible core that, precisely because of its incomprehensibility, motivates attempts of natural science to explain it. This "nature beneath natural science" is close to Bergson's and Scheler's conception. But to identify it with facticity is, according to Heidegger, a naturalization of facticity. Quite the opposite, Heidegger maintains that facticity is a primordial correlation, a "basic structure of life" which adheres to the existence of Dasein. By regarding facticity as bare nature, we already ignore that meaningfulness is only brought about by Dasein's being-in-the-world. If one starts with bare nature and then constructs meaningfulness as stemming from it, it is unexplainable how meanings emerge ex nihilo. This also explains Heidegger's limited and usually negative use of "nature" and his reluctance to explore the sense of the body: they are raised within a horizon that is already limited to beholding. Facticity is rather the integral structure of existence out of which the body and the bare nature becomes manifest.

Second, Heidegger explores here a world that precedes all worlds. By criticizing his earlier notions, in line with Husserl, of "with-world" and "self-world". This view assumes that each Dasein is essentially "worlding", bringing things within its reach into a complex of meaningfulness. These worlding Daseins then reach out for worlds of other Daseins, which constitutes intersubjectivity. In this model, the worlds of different Daseins are in a sense incommensurable. The familiar world and the unfamiliar world have a gap in between. But then the commonality of everyday comportment cannot be explained. The alternative model Heidegger provides assumes that the world is one and the same right from the start. Not independent of Daseins, this world is a virtual framework in which discrepancies may arise but can also be solved. Paradoxically, the unity of the common world is based upon the falling tendency of Dasein: it is the leveling, average mode of Dasein (das Man) that enables and promotes being-with-one-another. Although sociability is not initiated by das Man, it is within das Man that sociability gets anchored. Vanity leads to commonality: we can be with each other only because we are already not quite ourselves, but replaceable roles within a whole network. Accordingly, the annoying others are not so much other people themselves than masks with no one underneath. The bare nature is replaced with the common world, dim as it were, that is lived by das Man. He probably has in mind an image of animal life (or animal-like ones) that, dim and unconscious as it may be, nevertheless functions perfectly well. This is the soil out of which Dasein's self-understanding and self-interpretation grows.

I would recommend the preliminary part to anyone who is looking for a more substantial introduction to Husserlian phenomenology; after all, it is in the spirit of phenomenology that it should be introduced over and over again. It concisely organizes the ideas that are usually diffused within Husserl's work-site-style writings, and penetrates to the core. The main part, however, should not replace Being and Time, even not as an easier version of the latter. It is written with a different problematic, and it lacks the terminological precision and the rigorousness that Being and Time has. For Heidegger scholars that are familiar with Being and Time, however, this book is an interesting documentation of Heidegger's way of thinking, especially when we attend to what he abandons later on - the two books can be read in the same way Heidegger himself reads the two versions of Kant's Critique.