Lecture 1

Oh, I'd love to. In fact, that's right here on my list. It was going to come a little later, but not much. But so let me just put it in, in the place where it belongs, I think. So I've said already that Heidegger's either the most, or tied for the most important philosopher in the 20th century, and in general, that's because he's so original, and he calls into question so much of traditional philosophy. I could say the same of Wittgenstein. But Heidegger's certainly doing it very different from Wittgenstein, who's sort of starting from scratch. Heidegger is standing on the shoulders of two very important philosophers, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, and very influenced by them, because they were already calling into question, radically doubting that the whole philosophical project made any sense. And Heidegger, what Heidegger does is understand them very well and make them systematic. They each wrote, Kierkegaard writes his books under various pseudonyms, from various perspectives. Nietzsche writes in aphorisms. Heidegger, at least in the time of Being and Time, not later, but in the time of Being and Time, writes like a systematic philosopher,

but he's systematically taking apart the whole philosophical tradition, the way Kierkegaard and Nietzsche were starting to do it. And why is that important? Well, it's because what Heidegger's arguing, and Kierkegaard and Nietzsche were already, that there's something wrong with the whole tradition, which is trying to have some kind of theoretical understanding of what it is to be a human being. And if you understand what human beings are, and if you understand what theory is, which we haven't, I won't try to explain right now, you will see that that's not right, that that's treating human beings as some special complicated kind of object. And human beings aren't some special complicated kind of object. They're something entirely different. But Heidegger doesn't want to go to the other extreme and say, well, then a theoretical understanding of nature must be wrong too, after all science is just one more human practice. A popular view around here a few years ago, I hope it's losing its popularity. Anyway, Heidegger thinks, and I like his view on this, that you can have a theoretical understanding of nature, and that that's what modern science is, and it's getting it right about nature. But it makes no sense to think

that you can do the human sciences that way. That means that in history, psychology, political theory, sociology, anthropology, all of those have to be dealt with differently, which means that when you hear cognitive X, cognitive science, which is supposed to be the science of the way the mind works, or cognitive psychology, or cognitive anthropology, well, from Heidegger's point of view, they're all wrong. And that's an important, if that's true, given all the interest in cognitive everything, it's important to know it. I don't know what cognitive neuroscience, I think it's probably all wrong too, from Heidegger's point of view, that I'm not sure what cognitive neuroscience is committed to. I mean, in the background, you can just think, if it looks anything like a computer model of how we do whatever we do, think, act, socialize, perceive, and so forth, from Heidegger's point of view, it's wrong. That's why I wrote my book, What Computers Can’t Do, on the basis of reading Heidegger, and had this weird effect, of creating a new field, by bringing these two things together, that were so obviously, belonged together,

because Heidegger was opposing, the whole idea of computer models, before there were any computer models. So, that's why, that's one reason, why he's so important. And that's why he's so important, in Anglo-American thinking.

But that's not why he's so important, in continental philosophy. That's really, to me, the most amazing thing. All of continental philosophy, of the last half of the 20th century, at least, is Heideggerian, or is totally based on Heidegger. Can't, couldn't exist without Heidegger. And for those of you, who happen to know some of these people, that won't be our philosophy majors, who are carefully protected, from hearing about most of them. And,

all of them, are, and I'll just tell you, Sartre, of course, Being and Nothingness, is, as I heard a famous French professor say, and I think rightly, a brilliant misunderstanding, of Being and Time. It's, you have to be a kind of genius, like Sartre, to take a book, like Being and Time, which is anti-Cartesian, through and through, and rewrite it, as if it was a Cartesian book. I mean, you learn a whole lot that way, but nothing much about Heidegger, I think. But Sartre is, no doubt, I mean, Sartre would be the first to say this, he's just fixing up Heidegger, as any, any natural, intelligent French person, would have to do. And, but then there was, a different kind of French person, who really broke out of, of Descartes, thanks to Heidegger, and that's Merleau-Ponty.

I teach Merleau-Ponty's, Phenomenology of Perception, sort of every, other semester, every other year or so. Nothing to look at now. It's even, if anything, harder than Being and Time.

But it's harder than Being and Time, because it's so badly written. Whereas, whereas Being and Time is very clear. Merleau-Ponty is extremely murky. But he's deep. He takes over Heidegger, two big gaps in Being and Time. So huge, that it's sort of amazing, that people don't, didn't, I think, see them right off. Heidegger has nothing to say about perception, in Being and Time, which is pretty amazing. And nothing to say about the body. And those are the two things that Merleau-Ponty, he thinks about, and the only two things he thinks about. But there's a full-time job, and it's a tremendously important book, that comes in the space that Heidegger opens up. And Merleau-Ponty talks a lot about Heidegger. Hardly ever mentions him, but his vocabulary is all over the place. And he just takes Heidegger's ontology, and Heidegger's vocabulary, and applies it to what it is to be an embodied human being perceiving things. So, okay, there goes him. Probably not very many have heard of Pierre Bourdieu. How many know Pierre Bourdieu? Okay, well, more than I thought. Okay, you may know that Bourdieu made a kind of, I don't know, reputation denouncing Heidegger.

Because Bourdieu is such a strategist that on the French scene, that since Derrida had taken up Heidegger, to make, to clobber Derrida, Bourdieu wrote, something, what is it? The ontology? Anybody remember the book anyway? About Heidegger. But Bourdieu is a Heideggerian in two ways. One, he told me that his first love in philosophy was Heidegger. And two, he told me that he thinks he's applying Merleau-Ponty to the social field. And since Merleau-Ponty is applying Heidegger, Bourdieu is applying Heidegger secondhand. And he knows it. He just, he was beating on Heidegger because that was how to get ahead in the French world at the time.

So, let's see, Foucault actually said on his deathbed that the main influence on his life was Heidegger. And he says in this famous deathbed quote, where, by the way, it was, it's complicated in French, in France, Foucault, whereas Bourdieu got ahead by sort of bashing Heidegger, Foucault got ahead by pretending that he'd never heard of Heidegger as far as, but only on his deathbed when he didn't have to worry about how he looked on the French scene, could he say that he felt that he was a Heideggerian through and through, except as he says, Nietzsche won out in the end. So, the structure of Foucault's thought is Heideggerian, but he does a Nietzschean variation on it. All of this, you probably know. I mean, Heidegger was a Nazi for a while. For how long isn't too clear. But in 35, he published his, sorry, in 57, I think it is, he published some lectures from 1935, Introduction to Philosophy? To Metaphysics? What's the bad word? Introduction to Metaphysics, in which there is the sentence that describes the inner truth

and greatness of National Socialism. That is something to be upset about, and why people in France, particularly right after the war, like Merleau-Ponty and Foucault and Bourdieu and so forth, weren't going to go around saying they were Heideggerians. But one person who really got upset about it, and he's the next one, is Habermas. Habermas just, how many know about Habermas, the most important philosopher in Germany? He just hates Heidegger, and he, when he saw the, but what you don't usually know is until he saw this sentence, he was a total Heideggerian. He loved Being and Time. He was terribly disappointed to discover that Heidegger's been a Nazi.

And, but, and this is what I like a lot, Habermas is such a great guy. He is so honest and so committed to philosophy. He actually published the following sentence in his book on the discourse of modernity, that Being and Time is the greatest philosophy book since Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind. When you hear that coming from somebody who really hates Heidegger because he was a Nazi, and you see how important Habermas thinks that is, that means that when the dust clears, we're going to hear about Plato and Aristotle and Kant and Hegel and, and, and Nietzsche and Heidegger. These are the big people. Okay, so we've got everybody on my list now, and Levinas, who's got his own criticism of Heidegger, but whose first book was on Heidegger, and Derrida, whom you've all heard of, I think. I found this sentence, which I copied out for, because, I mean, I think it's sort of obvious that Derrida is a kind of Heideggerian, but he says in an interview called Position, what I have attempted to do would not have been possible without the opening of Martin Heidegger's questions. So there they are, all of them. I don't think I've left anybody out who makes, who's anybody on the scene in continental philosophy, and they're all Heideggerians.

And now finally, yeah? I find the book by Badiou— that is a terrible philosopher. I don't even care if this is being podcast. He's a disgrace to philosophy and to France, as far as I can see. Is it? Well, I don't think he's clear enough to be a Heideggerian.

We're talking about Badiou. Yeah. And that's Lacanian. And Lacan is a sort of Heideggerian, too. I didn't go into it. Yes, there's a kind of maverick Heideggerian string there. But I'd rather he hadn't been or doesn't. But I, okay, I'm glad Adam knows about this. I've listened to lectures by Badiou. I find it practically unbearable. So, let's see now. Okay, and finally, just having, what about the American scene? We've talked about where Heidegger comes in in continental philosophy. Well, he's coming up strong on the American scene. I can give you two reasons to think so. One is that good people in very good places, smart people, are publishing with very good publishers books on Heidegger, which there are some here, but I didn't nearly list them all. And they're working on some, Wrathall is going to bring out a new translation of Being and Time, which is going to be better than either of the ones that are around. And there are two important philosophers, anyway, in the Anglo-American scene who do take Heidegger very seriously. And that's Charles Taylor on the one hand. I don't know if you've ever heard of Charles Taylor. Have you?

Anybody? And Richard Rorty. I bet you've all heard. How many have heard of Richard Rorty? Everybody. Well, anyway, those are, those, they take Heidegger seriously. But that's, that's not enough. It's going to be important when a whole generation of very smart students takes Heidegger, in America, takes Heidegger very seriously. I think it's about to happen because one of our PhDs, Sean Kelly, now is a tenured professor at Harvard, and he's going to be teaching very, very smart students, of graduate students about Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, and that's going to make a difference. So I think, in the end, there will be an influence of Heidegger on American philosophy.

Okay, now, that's the answer to why I think Heidegger is important. Now I have to say what Heidegger says, and we'll do that. Let me see where we are. Okay, we're ready to talk about being because this is called Being and Time and because it's all about being, and it's very hard to understand what Heidegger means by being, and Heidegger says it's very hard for us to understand even the question of the meaning of being, so I will do my best for the rest of the time for another half hour to try to orient you to why somebody would be asking the question about the meaning of being and what sort of answers somebody could give and telling you first the wrong answers and then, from Heidegger's point of view, and then Heidegger, okay, so there is a traditional understanding of being that goes back, way back, I mean, to Aristotle and probably, I mean, Plato too for sure, Socrates. I think Heidegger thinks that the pre-Socratics didn't have that and he thinks the pre-Socratics were on the right track and then they got sort of detracted, I don't know what the right word is, waylaid by Plato, but the traditional understanding

sort of comes to a big focus and clarity in Aristotle and that is that being is, a being is a substance. The way of being of entities, the way of being of beings is to be substantive. That's a mouthful, but I'll take that. That means that, and you all believe that, and you've all heard that in lots of philosophy courses and in endless variations. So there's this lectern.

That's the ultimate kind of being and what is it? Well, for Aristotle, it's a self-sufficient entity. That's what it is to be a substance and it's got properties inherent in it. That's the other thing that substances do. So this is brown and it's hard and it's heavy and it's probably got a lot of other properties in it too, inhering in it. And the properties depend on the substances. You can't have the properties running around without inhering in some substance, but the properties also have a kind of independence. That is, the being hard and being brown and being heavy, each of those properties is self-sufficient in its own way, meaning it doesn't need any other properties to be that way. To see why that's a funny thing, why anybody would doubt it, you've got to see that Merleau-Ponty thinks that the wooly redness of a carpet is different than the shiny redness of a fire engine and so forth, even though they all could match the same color strip red because properties are not independent of each other but are all holistically related in perception. That's what we're not going to talk about. But because what we're going to talk about and what Heidegger

is going to talk about and reject is what you could call an atomistic account of substance and of properties. I don't mean chemical atoms, but I mean that whatever the basic elements are, now not talking about science, but just whatever the basic, I don't know, I can't think of a good word for this except being, pieces of being are something like that, are independent of each other. The properties are not affected by what substance they adhere in, they're not affected by the other properties, and the substances aren't affected by each other. It's all atomistic in that sense. And the opposite of atomistic is holistic, where everything is influenced by and depends on and couldn't be what it is except for everything else that's involved with it. And we'll get to that in a minute. But right now, we've just got to see that for Aristotle and for the whole tradition, to be is to be a substance.

And in German, that's Vorhandenheit. And that gets translated different ways in different translations, of course, and unfortunately. Vorhandenheit. That means presence at hand. And that's how it gets translated in the big Heidegger book that you've got. Presence at hand is the way of being of substances. And I just tried to describe the way of being of substances. It's this self-sufficient atomic way of being. And that gets translated as presence at hand.

At hand. And in the Basic Problems, for instance, it's translated as extant, which is not very good, I think, but that's how it came out. In my commentary, I'm not sure I still believe this, but in the commentary it's called the occurrent.

We're naming the way of being of substances. The way of being of substances is presence at hand, is Vorhandenheit. And you can translate it in lots of different ways. That makes it all the harder in this course. When you start reading, I've got to say this, when you read other texts of Heidegger or when you read commentaries on texts of Heidegger, they're all using different words for these crucial German words. So not only do you have to learn sort of a new language, namely Heideggerian, to read Heidegger, you've got to learn a lot of different dialects of Heideggerian to read the different translations of Heidegger. That makes life difficult. But you've got to keep it in mind. You've got to keep in mind and look in the glossary. I've mentioned that on the page I hand out about supplementary reading because you've got to, you won't understand anything if you think that having read a lot about presence at hand and Being and Time, you're now reading about the occurrent in Basic Problems and you don't see that it's the same thing. And sometimes right inside of Being and Time, they're crucial words. I wrote it down here because I care so much about it at the very bottom of the page of stuff about reading. There's this word Woraufhin. If you don't understand,

if you don't translate it right, as our translation calls it towards which, it calls it the, what else does it call it? Anyway, it has to mean on the basis of which. And that's a very, very important notion in Heideggerian. We're not ready for it yet. But I want to draw a general conclusion of warning. When you read Being and Time, there are certain words which, if you don't get them right, you can't possibly be understanding what you're reading. And if you come across the “towards-which,” I wish I could remember another wrong, well, that's the right meaning on the basis of which. There's one more wrong one. On the basis of which is okay, in terms of which is maybe okay. But anyway, there are certain words I'll warn you that you should correct, so to speak, and really, really write in the right one because you can't understand it unless you get the right translation.

And certainly, I want to say it now because I may forget to say it when papers are becoming due. When you're quoting Heidegger, when you're using some of these very wrong words, it's very hard to understand by you and by the person reading your paper, put in one of the okay translations. These are all okay translations of presence at hand. There are only certain words which I don't want to go into right now which are not okay and which completely mess up the meaning. Okay, back to where we are. So presence at hand is everything that is self-sufficient is a substance. Everything that is a substance is self-sufficient. Tables are substances, trees, the sun, numbers, whatever. And that's what Aristotle was interested in describing. And

this goes through the whole history of philosophy and finally comes out in our time as the fact that there are substances and they have properties gives you a subject and predicate understanding of the same phenomenon. You name the substance as a subject, the table, and you predicate of it being brown. That's the property. That leads finally to the predicate calculus which is all about how in general the formal structure of substances with properties—ontologies. And then you get the interesting phenomena that it looks if you believe this ontology as if all you need is the right story about all the subjects or substances in the world and all their properties or predicates and how these are all related logically by formal relations. You could describe everything.

Now who would have thought anybody would believe that? Well, that happens to be what people in artificial intelligence believe. They're the ultimate heirs to this present at hand ontology. John McCarthy at Stanford believes to this day unless he's changed his mind since I last saw him that everything intelligible about the world and about human beings can be represented in the predicate calculus. That's exactly what you get if in your ontology you think that the only kind of being the only way of being is present at hand then everything must be understandable with present at hand and if you've got a formal model for understanding everything as substances with properties you ought to be able to understand everything. Well, that didn't work and Heidegger's got a very good account of why it didn't work. And now I think everybody thinks the good old what John Haugeland another Berkeley PhD thinks called good old fashioned AI or what in more fancy talk is the model of the mind in which it has formal representations of the world which it manipulates in logical ways. That whole way of thinking about

human beings what happened is you got substance ontology got turned into a research program by the people in AI and it failed. So that's one good reason for reading Heidegger to see what happened there. People wasted a lot of time and DARPA the defense department wasted a lot of money trying to get trying to sort of apply substance ontology and it didn't work. Well, why didn't it work? Well, you can sort of intuit why it didn't work, can't you? I mean, if the essence of it is the self-sufficient character of the substances and their properties of the subjects and their predicates then if things were holistic it wouldn't work. And the genius of Heidegger is to take the most obvious and simple case of the wholism of our world or our experience and work it out and show that it's not understandable in terms of substance and properties and moreover substance and properties are derivative in some way from this.

Well, what is this? What is this other way of being? Well, it's the being of equipment. Heidegger takes it up talking about hammers and he says that what's characteristic of all equipment only he'll just do it with hammers is that a hammer's way of being is such that it couldn't be a hammer if it weren't for there being nails and wood and houses and people who had the skills to make the pound nails into wood. All of that has to hang together for something to be a hammer.

When I get to this how many people maybe too far in the past now, anybody seen The Gods Must Be Crazy? Is that still around? I mean, there you get the case of something which for us is part of a whole equipment totality, a Coke bottle in which you put liquids and it has a cap and there are Coke bottle openers and there are Coke bottle machines and there are glasses you pour it into and so forth and so forth and it gets thrown out of an airplane and lands in this tribe in Africa and they don't know what to make of it. It's just a substance and so they try to fit it into their world by using it to roll tortilla-like things or to hit each other over the head with as a weapon and so forth but it's certainly not a Coke bottle. There is no way for it to be a Coke bottle in that world of those people. So the whole idea is for Heidegger that you can view a Coke bottle as a hard greenish sort of transparent substance but then you miss what it is to be a Coke bottle. Same with hammers. You can regard a hammer as a wooden shank with a metal blob on the end but that doesn't get it for what it is to be a hammer

and it now comes a trickier move. You might think well all you need is to add something that's this wooden shank with this metal blob on the end and it has a bunch of properties long hard handle and shiny heavy blobby end and so forth and it also has the property of being for hammering. Aha! Now it looks like you've sort of absorbed it into the substance ontology but of course that doesn't work because being for hammering suggests that one it leaves out why you're hammering and hammering is something if you just took the thing and bashed a rock with it you wouldn't be using a hammer you wouldn't be hammering hammering is it's something that is sort of culturally defined as this piece of equipment is for driving in nails for attaching wood for building houses and so forth it's got this normative element you can use a hammer as if it were a screwdriver to open a paint can but it doesn't make it into a screwdriver it's got to have a place in the practices

of the culture in which it is related to a lot of other equipment and to the goals to the skills of people and to the goals of people so in the end Heidegger thinks that we'll talk about this more next time he says the hammer has a in order to that I pick up the hammer in order to hammer in nails it has a towards which that is a task towards putting these pieces of wood together it has a final towards which which would be say building a house and then it has even more beyond that a for the sake of which which is somebody building a house is doing it for the sake of shelter or for the sake of being a home builder or being a carpenter finally this equipment thing ends up no I don't want to say anymore about it for the second it ends up that way and now I just want to write that on the board somewhere we're talking so there's a second way of being and this way of being is holistic and and can't be dealt with in the substance

so here we've got Zuhandenheit am I writing big enough to see back there okay that's a way of being that in our translation is readiness to hand

and in my translation I decided to call it availableness I regret that I regret it because it suggests that a hammer in a drawer still has the way of being of readiness to hand I think for Heidegger the hammer only has the way of being of readiness to hand when you're hammering with it and so availableness is misleading Zuhandenheit is Heidegger's word and I think readiness to hand will do I don't really have a candidate for the best translation of these but so I'll use I'm going to use the translations unless it's really wrong like the way it deals with Woraufhin sometimes I'm just going to stick to presence at hand and presence at hand that's the way of being of substances and now we've got a second thing which is readiness to hand and that's the way of being of equipment this is a very it's the sort of general property no I can't say that

very hard it's what it is about equipment that makes it equipment is going to be described as readiness to hand and it's that whole complicated story of holism and interrelatedness with our practices with our skills and so forth all that goes into what it is to be a hammer and the name for that whole system that way of being is readiness to hand okay now let's see where we are

and that is why good old fashioned AI and all these cognitivist enterprises are going to fail to begin with is because they're all assuming that you can get along with a substance ontology and ignoring this vast amount of stuff which are hammers and all sorts of equipment which is so basic for what it is to have a world and be a human being and they can't account for them because they can't capture the holism of it in fact the whole point of being a substance is not to be part of a holism but to be an element in an atomic order and if it's true that for equipment to be equipment at all to be the kind of thing that it needs to be fitted in this holistic structure well then there's a big problem a huge problem and there's a lot to be said for the next few weeks about all that but I'm just going to go on because I want to give you the whole picture of what's going on here so let me see

oh well I mentioned but we have come back to it that Heidegger also sees something very interesting that there is something which is not a property that hammers can have and that's something which he calls when he talks about it he doesn't talk about it much unreadiness to hand a hammer could just turn into a present at hand object and it wouldn't be a hammer anymore it would just be a kind of thing but a hammer can also be too heavy and if a hammer is too heavy that's a kind of holistic something or other I can't call it a property I'll call it an aspect a hammer is too heavy for me doing this job with these nails and this wood in this situation you can't have just the property too heavy adhering in the hammer the way you can have it being heavy or being brown or being metal or something and that's again an example that's a kind of situated holism too heavy for this job and that goes with equipment

but I want to go on I've got 10 more minutes and talk about the third way of being there are three crucial ways of being of which the tradition only knows one it's hard to believe when I find myself saying this I'm just always blown away that some things these simple obvious pervasive important things that Heidegger sees that are so clear and so incontrovertible that the philosophy managed to go on for 2,000 years just not noticing it or not thinking it was worth thinking about so now we've got this one and now the other one is an interesting one because the third way of being what is the third way what very important way of being isn't being equipment and isn't being an object

somebody's going to come up with it. Yeah? “Being a human being.” Exactly. Being us we're not our way of being isn't equipment you can treat people like equipment you can use them and you can treat people like objects like doctors have to do you can operate on them like a piece of meat but you can't but we when we're being human beings aren't equipment and we're not objects now you might think well at least philosophers noticed that surely they had lots to say about people but Heidegger thinks and I think it's fascinating that when they talked about people philosophers talked about people as particular kinds of substances so the soul is a kind of substance in Plato it's a substance and it's got three parts and it's so independent of everything that it can be immortal and not involved in the world and not involved in time at all so when philosophers noticed people they just went on with their substance ontology and you can just see it going on Descartes is interesting because he was up front about it what did he say we were

you must know if you're not you better leave right away what's his name for us the cogito is yeah that's what we do yes we're a thinking substance we're a res extensa that's a kind of I mean sorry that's what the world is we're a res cogitans we're a thinking substance but the res in there is Latin for the substance word ousia in Aristotle but and you think well maybe they stopped thinking that way but no no Leibniz has monads and those are self sufficient substances and Kant has a transcendental subject and that's a self sufficient substance I'm not so sure about Husserl but I think Husserl thinks that we're a kind of self sufficient something or other which he calls transcendental subjectivity and it's nice to have a wonderful brilliant homegrown version of this namely John Searle he's still got a substance ontology he says we're minds and we have mental states and we have intentional content those of you who have the philosophy of mind will know that and he's clear

that minds are self sufficient that the whole world might not exist we'd still have this intentional content sort of directed toward the world Husserl had the same view even if there wasn't any world because minds are self sufficient substances and they also have other internal states like beliefs you can have beliefs about all sorts of things whether they exist or not unicorns and so forth you still so the idea that we are substances is right there in front of us how many of this I wanted to ask this anyway how many had the Husserl course this summer okay well I think I don't know what Joseph told you and Husserl is a hard person to understand but I'm pretty sure that Husserl thought that John Searle and Husserl think very similarly and that they are just the latest version of the substance ontology that they think that we are a thinking thing or an intention having thing or something like that intentional content is still a very very fundamental hot

term that intentional content is what there is in the mind that points you towards objects in the world so when I think about something or believe something or desire something the something the direction toward the something is the intentional content and whether there is any such thing or not is another issue because intentional content is self-sufficient I mean that's amazing but it's still around and you can always tell whether somebody's got that kind of view of the mind because you can ask whether they doubt whether you can doubt the existence of the external world Searle's quite up front about it that he thinks it's not interesting to doubt it and nobody should go around trying to prove it but you can doubt it because the mind has got the content itself sufficient it's like The Matrix

only you get switched to the mind being identical with the brain so that Searle thinks we could be brains in a vat because it turns out the substance of mind and the substance of brain are really so closely related but then never mind problems like that the important thing is to see that for Heidegger we're not substances we're not consciousnesses that would be pushing us back to the thinking thing in Descartes what are we then what is our way of being well our way of being is a kind of activity we are what we do Heidegger later says that is we give ourselves an identity by taking up a bunch of practices so that's remember when I stopped and said I don't want to say that yet now we can say that we pick up this hammer in order to drive in a nail in order to put these pieces of wood together in order to make a house and now for the sake of an understanding of myself as a carpenter that is all that activity amounts to taking a stand on my being and now we get to what is

the way of being of us of now the word Dasein comes in there what is that way of being well that way of being is to take a stand on what it is to be that sort of being and when I say take a stand on it the translation says and that's okay it makes an issue of it you don't want to make it sort of conscious I'll talk more about that next time you don't go around you don't have to go around and say I'm a carpenter your whole life you have to take an extreme case my favorite example is somebody could be a sacrificial mother and that means that they've got equipment for taking care of the kids and people who will make sure that everything gets done and they're ready to give up whatever they desire to do it and so forth they've taken a stand on themselves defined themselves as a sacrificial mother but they don't need to know it all they would say was well I'm just taking care of my children I love my children everybody must feel the same way the point is this Dasein which is us by its using equipment and acting in the world gives itself an interpretation of what it is to be

a human being in general and a human being in that particular culture and this particular human being like being a teacher in this case and the name we've got to have a name for that way of being I doubt if you know that until you read Being and Time the name for that way of being is existence

that one's easy to translate existence but the Heidegger says trees don't exist and even hammers don't exist there's only and God doesn't exist that isn't any big deal atheist claim it's just a terminological claim that only human beings exist because Heidegger is going to use that word to describe the way of being of human beings the way of being of human beings is that unlike hammers and

trees for human beings they are concerned in their activity to take a stand or have an interpretation of what it is to be a human being that's a way of being and he calls it existence

so now you've perhaps got a sort of understanding of what this question of being is when you see that there are three kinds and you see that each of them is a way of making something intelligible if you don't if you understand this way of being that one then you make substances intelligible you're able to deal with objects I didn't use the word objects because it's Descartes instead of Aristotle but it's the same sort of notion you're able to deal with objects and make sense of them if you've got the understanding of being of Zuhandenheit then you're able to deal with equipment and make sense of it and if you've got the understanding of being which is existence you're able to deal with what it is to be a human being and make sense of it so then you can understand a crucial sentence on page 25 get that piece of my

book I'm going to stop with this because it's the punch line he asks the bottom of 25 what is asked about is being then he says that which determines entities as entities I don't want to talk about that the crucial phrase is that on the basis of which the which is right there that on the basis of which entities are already understood that means having this background skills on the basis of which you're able to cope with substances equipment and yourself and to talk about the understanding of being is to talk about the finally that which makes everything intelligible being roughly equals intelligibility so things can be intelligible as substances they can be intelligible as equipment and they can be intelligible as people and what does all that have in common why are those all called modes of being

that's because those are modes of intelligibility this is now I'm sort of going out on my own limb because when you read he's never going to tell you very explicitly this is the most explicit sentence I know what he what he's meaning by being he's meaning that something or other which we haven't explained fully yet on the basis of which beings all three kinds of beings are understood because you understand their way of being okay that you look puzzled and that's alright I mean it's puzzling but I've done the best I can. See you next time.