H4CBlog

(This is an excerpt from an apologetics paper I once wrote.)

Martin Heidegger (1899-1976) sought for a new way of considering the “whatness” of things by asking the question, “What does it mean for something - anything - to exist at all?”  Not this particular thing, nor that (i.e., the realm of the sciences and traditional metaphysics); not a taxonomic understanding of stuff that we experience, measure, and adjudicate, but rather, why is there something rather than nothing at all?  What underlies our apprehension of anything?  What is presupposed in the question? 

In such a question, we are not asking “Does x exist, and, if so, what is it?” But rather we are looking for a coherent explanation of our being vis-à-vis a confrontation with the “world.” The question, note, bypasses the representational model of truth, with its inherent dualism, and asks rather how it is that we exist, interpret, and navigate within our own world. Its locus shifts the question from traditional dualisms to a question about the way we are responsible for constituting meaning in our lives.

How does meaning determine an entity?  Does an existential hermeneutic underlie any attempt at taxonomy? The question, “What is x?” is replaced with “What does it mean [for me] to be x?” That is, at the bottom of (the early) Heidegger’s question is Dasein itself, or the radical question of what it means to be in the world.

“Objective” and “Subjective” Worlds

The interpreter is not set over and above the object in some sort of transcendence, because the interpreter is already in the world, and any object encountered is likewise in the world. The “world” is not “out there,” outside of me, but I am part of its constitution: I am always in relation to things as part of my “world-consciousness.” Thus the fact/value distinction is an illusion: to concern myself with an interpretation already presupposes my commitment to engage the world on some level. Existence and the “whatness” of things is not an neutral discovery, since below the threshold of identifying something is a decision to make it matter, to find its place, to acknowledge its presence.
Heideggerian ontology makes the move that “being-in-the-world” is the ultimate presupposition of any knowledge claim. The subject/object dualism is a fiction of modern metaphysics, and hence the mode of one’s being, the hermeneutic of one’s being, becomes properly basic.