POLI3306: Heidegger and the Seperation Between Ontics and Ontology

In today's class we reviewed two heavily contrasted works, Sartre's Existentialism is a Humanism and Heidegger's Letter on Humanism. Often when these two texts are compared it is done to draw attention to the differences between metaphysics, in its most sympathetic articulation, and ontology. However, despite the best efforts of today's presenter, this point was not brought to the surface. As I stood by, resisting the temptation to interject, I allowed this misrepresentation of Heidegger to gloss over my own foggy impressions.

The error that seemed to reemerge, like an exposed sore, centers around the objectification of the term Being. This is not an uncommon error due to a peculiar choice made by the original English translators to include the capitalized "Being" to make reference to the ontological structure of existence and the term "being" to represent worldly ontic existence. With the words spelling and context so similar, Being is often equated with being although the two are dramatically different. As a result, readers tend to regard Being through objective language as a thing or state of being, although these qualities are not something denied of being(s) in themselves. Moreover, there may even be confusion of Being as the divine but this is also a misunderstanding of Heidegger's intention to focus on the everydayness of existence in the world. So then what is Being? How does Being impart itself on being(s)?

This is indeed the very question that we are urged to re-encounter by Heidegger, for it is not only a concern for the conditions of subject/object relations in the world but even refers to what is necessary for the act of questioning to occur. We do not only come to Being through rationality, but interestingly it is in our standing already in Being that we can begin to observe it. If we are to understand the way each being, as a thing in itself, standing in Being, then each being must exhibit whether through actions or words something about this essence. Heidegger adopts the strategy of description as a means of accessing this essential knowledge that the subject may have forgot or do not acknowledge themselves. Description as a form of analysis avoids the error of falsely attributing ideals and regards the way each thing displays an inherent knowledge of its own essence. Being is for Heidegger a necessary assumption of any possible ontology.

To illustrate this perspective, Heidegger makes reference to language as "the house of Being" that presents an image of our existence in based within Being. We do not need to seek Being as some sort of mystical or primordial origin, it is the condition of existence as a whole. His image of language as a house is particularly evocative in the way that it shows a connection to the past manifestations of Being that are the results of its previous guardians and creators. Man "dwells" within this home of language, and through thought man's relation to Being is made manifest in language. However, thinking is not some action because of an effect or is applied. "Thinking acts insofar as it thinks" and is given from the unfolding of Being (p.217). This is where Heidegger's criticism of humanism lies, for in giving thinking over to the technical interpretation, that stretches back to the Greeks and their emphasis on praxis and poesis, it strips thinking of its observance of the truth of Being. According to Heidegger, our views of thinking have even been reduced to the level where non-purposive thought, or theoria, has a determined the function and place in the discipline of philosophy.

The question that remains is how do we give way to a presuppositionless philosophy when our understanding of its purpose has been the result of invasive interpretation of thinking? The presenter concluded with a similar question by asking whether such a regard for Being was possible and if so what would it represent? Heidegger does not speak much about what it is and I believe this is an intentional device. For if we are to preclude what Being is, then everything that would follow would be conditional. This is precisely the criticism put forward in Letter on Humanism concerning the role of metaphysics and its tyranny of Being. When man is placed in terms of a defined essence, then he is made to be an object fixed in the world. The way Marxism regards man as social, or how Christianity regards man as part divine, both of these preclude man to a projected fate - one that is irreversible and confined a metaphysical interpretation. How are we to question metaphysics if it is the very point of departure for our inquiry? Admittedly, although there may be changes throughout history as to what is or not considered an essence of man, these changes are not anything substantially different from the overall metaphysical structure. We come to the conclusion, along with Heidegger, that existentialism as a humanism that has inverted its essence still retains a metaphysical character in its binary structure. What is needed is a regard for Being, as the foreknowledge of essence, known in the unfolding through being(s) - Dasein.