THE ETHICS OF BEING-WITH: EXPLORING ETHICS IN HEIDEGGER’S BEING AND TIME A Thesis Submitted to the Committee on Graduate Studies in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in the Faculty of Arts and Science TRENT UNIVERSITY Peterborough, Ontario, Canada (c) Copyright by Adam Rejak 2014 Theory, Culture and Politics M.A. Graduate Program September 2014 ABSTRACT The Ethics of Being-With: Exploring Ethics in Heidegger’s Being and Time Adam Rejak Martin Heidegger is perhaps best known for his work Being and Time, in which he tries to re-discover what he deems to be a forgotten question; the meaning of being. However, what many have missed in this work is the ethical potential it presents, particularly through his notion of Mitsein. This thesis will discuss how the history of philosophy has misunderstood the question of intersubjectivity. Throughout the history of philosophy, there has been a tendency to focus on detachment of the subject, rather than an engaged existence. Heidegger overcomes this by introducing the concept of Mitsein and allowing us to think of being-with one another as something which is integral to our very being, rather than something which comes to us through detached reflection. The consequences of this re-interpretation are significant for ethics because our starting point is always-already with others, rather than isolated and alone. Keywords: Heidegger, Mitsein, Ethics, Being-with, Intersubjectivity ii Acknowledgements I would like to thank my supervisor, Professor David Holdsworth, my reader Kathryn Norlock and my external supervisor Emilia Angelova. This project would not be possible without their hours of help and guidance. I learned a great deal during this process and I am very grateful for all the help they provided. Lastly, I would like to thank both the Theory, Culture and Poltics, and the Philosophy departments at Trent University. The professors and staff from both departments were very helpful in helping me achieve my personal goals. This has been a great experience which I will never forget. iii The Ethics of Being-With: Exploring Ethics in Heidegger’s Being and Time Table of Contents Abstract Page ii Acknowledgements Page iii Introduction Page 1-6 Chapter 1 – The Tradition Page 7-22 A) Ancient/Medieval Page 8-14 B) Modern Philosophy Page 14-21 C) Conclusion Page 21-22 Chapter 2 - Being-there and Being-with Page 23-47 A) Being-There & Being-In Page 24-32 B) Being-With Page 32-46 C) Heidegger’s Ethical Potential Page 46-47 Chapter 3 - Heidegger’s Mitsein: A New Ethics Page 48-72 A) Ethics in the Tradition Page 49-62 B) Being-with Others Ethically Page 62-71 Conclusion Page 72-74 References Page 74-75 iv 1 Introduction Martin Heidegger has been one of the most influential philosophers of the past one hundred years. His ideas revolutionized many fields and his work has influenced many different disciplines. In the field of philosophy, he is known for his seminal book, Being and Time. Few works in modern history have been so influential, with the exception, perhaps, of Immanuel Kant’s The Critique of Pure Reason. Being and Time continues today to be one of the most important philosophical treatises because of its revolutionary turn away from the metaphysical tradition. Heidegger’s work is known for its destruction (itself a Heideggarian term) of modern subjectivity and its move towards existentialism. Yet, for some, it has an ethical dimension to it as well. The purpose of this thesis will be to look at how Heidegger’s ideas within Being and Time can be seen as ethically relevant. This will be done by examining the history of philosophy and how it has misinterpreted the idea of intersubjectivity.1 We will see that through Heidegger’s idea of Mitsein we are able to break away from isolated subjectivity and move into an existential ethics which at its core is fundamentally relational. In other words, our existence is always-already with others, rather than being constituted autonomously and coming to know others through detached intuition or reason. Thus, our starting point is drastically different than those of the past. This will ultimately lead to an ethics which is based on a fundamental sameness that is dictated by our being-in-the-world. This work will consist of three chapters. The first will provide a brief history of epistemology and metaphysics with respect to the concept of being, from ancient and medieval times, all the way through modern philosophy and up until Heidegger. The 1 My primary focus will be Heidegger’s Being and Time as well as various secondary sources. I will not be using any other texts written by Heidegger. 2 chapter will discuss some aspects of ancient and medieval philosophy, but will focus more on modern philosophers such as René Descartes, Immanuel Kant and Edmund Husserl to show how the question of being has evolved. We shall see that from the time of Plato up until Husserlian phenomenology, the question of being has been misunderstood. Despite their best intentions, philosophers have continually looked at being in terms of entities. This has caused a number of problems within philosophy, because beings were treated without access to the ultimate questions of the world. We were left to think that being was something inherently separate from everyday existence and that it was something which we could never access. This led to beings becoming isolated not only from their own world, but from each other. Beginning with ancient philosophy, there were the forms which existed in the ethereal realm which we could never access. Aristotle countered this idea and said that the true essence of things was present within the object itself. Nevertheless, it was still never completely accessible in a singular form. Medieval philosophers imagined that God was infinite and could never possibly be known in His true form. Descartes’ idea of subjectivity was meant to change the question of being and knowledge by giving the ability to know things through rational deductive reason. It meant that we were no longer dependent upon the world in order to have knowledge. However, with this idea came an entirely new form of isolation for the subject, one which would cause a regress in philosophical knowledge. With ancient and medieval philosophy, we were at least able to participate in the essence of wordly objects. But, with the turn towards subjectivity, we were left on our own, trying to escape ourselves and get out into the world. In some ways Kant resolved 3 these issues by reversing the order of daily experience. Human beings became the focal point of knowledge rather than the world impressing itself upon us. We were meant to discover things on our own without being passive agents. However, Kant never truly resolved the subject/object binary which was created by our inability to know the world as a whole. We could not escape our own subjectivity and understand the world of objects or even other subjects. The best we could hope for was coming up with analogies that made others “just like me.” From this we can see our ethical dilemma. If we cannot truly know the other, then how can we expect to have an idea of true ethical relationships? For centuries, philosophers tried to resolve this issue, but it took the ideas of Martin Heidegger to theorize about the subject/object binary in a completely novel way. For many, the question of being has very little to do with ethics, but what I intend to prove is that this misunderstanding has ultimately led not merely to epistemological problems, but to ethical ones as well. This is due to the fact that our starting point of subjectivity has always been from a point of isolation. This is a point about which Heidegger speaks extensively in regards to the misinterpretation throughout the history of philosophy. He makes it clear that he does not want to start with an isolated subject and move outwards. Heidegger states that what we have meant by others has been incorrectly formulated. For him, others “does not mean everybody else but me – those from whom the I distinguishes itself. Others are, rather, those from whom one mostly does not distinguish oneself, those among whom one also is.”2 2 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time. Translated by Joan Stambaugh. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010), 115. 4 This will be the topic of the second chapter. Unlike philosophers from the past, Heidegger did not try to solve the problem through epistemology. For him there was no need to try and learn the essence of the world through cognition, or escape the confines of our minds in order to gain knowledge about the world of other beings. Instead, Heidegger focused all of his attention on being and ontology. This solved the epistemological issue of knowing others because it framed the question in a completely new way. For Heidegger, our existence is Dasein (being-there in the world of objects and other people). Dasein shares in the openness of the world and participates in being simply by virtue of its existence. Secondly, part of the primordial constitution of Dasein is being-there in the world with others (Mitsein). This will be a crucial point upon which my thesis rests. Heidegger uniquely points out that Dasein’s existence is always-already with others. No matter what the situation may be, we are together with others in some way or another. He states as an example that the worker who uses a tool is connected, by use of that tool, to the one who manufactured it.3 This is the revolutionary turn away from not only enclosed subjectivity, but from isolated subjects that try to understand the other through cognitive reason.