Lesson Plan for Beginning Heidegger's Introduction to Metaphysics

Years ago, when I took a class on existentialism in undergrad, we simply read Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Sartre. Which sounds wonderful, but we weren't really shown what we could do with the material besides compare and contrast one author with another. There weren't readings on the syllabus which asked us, say, to take a more traditional teaching on Abraham and Issac and see the difference with Fear and Trembling. Or which pushed us to consider if Enid Coleslaw is capable of making an ethical choice using a framework provided by Sartre. Or even pursued more fully the question of Heidegger's Nazism.

So I'm thinking how to introduce Heidegger at the advanced collegiate seminar level (300/400 level courses) or graduate courses. And what I want are the questions from students to flow from the second we start reading. For example, I don't want anyone sitting comfortably thinking they know what Dasein means. I want them to play with different ideas of what it could mean, test those ideas, see if the questionability/openness of human existence makes sense against other conceptions. I also want them to immediately create a conversation with the text, and it is critical to have a diversity of voices around to make that conversation fully realized.

To that end, here are the required readings for the first session. If you want to read and tell me what you get out of them, I would be thrilled:

• Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, pages 1-2
• Gregory Fried, "Introduction to Metaphysics" from The Bloomsbury Companion to Heidegger, ed. Raffoul & Nelson. (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013)
• Kay Ryan, "Turtle"
• Porochista Khakpour, "Just (Don't) Do It"

Our concern is with Heidegger and political philosophy. To that end, we want to know what is at stake in questions of being. What does it mean when you can't achieve the goals society sets for you? What can we learn from other forms of life on this earth? And what do we need to know about the tradition to uncover the questions we should be asking? We'll start with a brief overview of the last question to get things started.

Being and Western Thought

Parmenides introduced the world to the idea that if all things are, then being must be one and change must be illusory. It sounds ludicrous, but Parmenides is only making obvious what we want the truth to be. This is how we conceive truth, this is why we are dismissive of opinion, and this is a major problem if you want to tell people to value doing science and collecting knowledge.

And that is one thing I want you to consider at stake with regard to "being." You want to say the early philosophers are playing word games. All this guy is doing is taking the word "is" and saying since everything he sees has that as a predicate, then everything must be the same. And sure, it is a word game, but it isn't making the point you think it is making. It is pushing you to explain the conditions for what you consider true and bringing up the messy problem that those conditions, for many objects of truth, are relative. Moreover, this is happening at a time when people do science, but not like we do after the advent of scientific method. There isn't a demonstrable push for science or technology in these societies. Asking the wrong questions can get you into trouble: sometimes, the celestial bodies are no less than gods. Some make observations, some run experiments, some do mathematics. The notion that a hypothesis must be falsifiable is present in these activities, but it is not spelled out. And myths, again, matter immensely. Eventually, the way you're going to do science is by asking "What is X?" (Note: "What is" operates as an interrogative with "being" at its heart.) Plato's Socrates will do that for "What is justice?" and "What is virtue?", and I do believe that is a sly way of getting to "What is water?" and "What is earth?" at a time when there is no such thing as chemistry as we understand it.

But that is later than Parmenides. Parmenides' more immediate interlocutor was Heraclitus. "Panta rhei," everything flows; "no man ever steps in the same river twice." Where is truth going to lie if there is no static conception of being? Heraclitus, in what fragments we have, appeals to logos – language and speech – as some kind of a mechanism to order what we need.

So this is just one example of what's going on with "being." You've got questions about the possibility of science and questions about how truth in general is supposed to work.

Now Heidegger refuses the label "existentialist," but that absolutely characterizes his work. And existentialism, a more recent school of thought, takes the question of being another direction. Being became science, you could say, and it became that and a moral hierarchy in the Middle Ages. God is unity and truth and the good; His being gives us the world. Now the Thomistic transcendentals are 13th century thinking, but the Catholic Church is the only game in town until a little after 1500. When you're reading texts in the late 16th and early 17th century, many of them are in Latin because the clergy are the only reliably literate class. You can see where I'm going with this: the notion there is some hierarchy of being, with moral principles and maybe God at the top, persists into the 20th (and 21st!) century in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. And existentialists want to break from this. They don't want to wrestle with how traditional morality will produce the ultimate happiness of those subject to it. The question is whether a modern, absurd age requires a new ethic. Here's de Beauvoir on Sartre, both existentialists, in The Ethics of Ambiguity:

Man, Sartre tells us, is “a being who makes himself a lack of being in order that there might be being.” That means, first of all, that his passion is not inflicted upon him from without. He chooses it. It is his very being and, as such, does not imply the idea of unhappiness. If this choice is considered as useless, it is because there exists no absolute value before the passion of man, outside of it, in relation to which one might distinguish the useless from the useful. The word “useful” has not yet received a meaning on the level of description where Being and Nothingness is situated. It can be defined only in the human world established by man’s projects and the ends he sets up. In the original helplessness from which man surges up, nothing is useful, nothing is useless. It must therefore be understood that the passion to which man has acquiesced finds no external justification. No outside appeal, no objective necessity permits of its being called useful. It has no reason to will itself. But this does not mean that it can not justify itself, that it can not give itself reasons for being that it does not have. And indeed Sartre tells us that man makes himself this lack of being in order that there might be being.

You can see what de Beauvoir is fighting against. Don't people have to be told to be good? A very Christian, Augustinian notion: one that goes hand-in-hand with original sin. Against this, de Beauvoir says people choose "a lack of being" to truly be. They do not do this because they are told to do so by God or their football coach. Moreover, you can't call people useless as the modern age is so eager to do. "Why aren't you at work?" has been screamed by managers and landlords and financiers since the dawn of industry. Here, with existentialism, "nothing is useless." How are you supposed to know what material is meant to build your life?

So a lot is going on with how you talk about being. The indeterminacy of the word doesn't indicate it is meaningless. Rather, because it is questionable, it has played a central role in the history of ideas and the history of the world. As we're exploring Heidegger, we want to find what we can latch on to – maybe it'll be a small, personal detail, an insight into a manga we read, or a larger claim about what underlies our assumptions nowadays – and we want to work from there.

Illustrating and Expanding the Opening Paragraph of Introduction to Metaphysics

So as we read Introduction to Metaphysics, we want to flood ourselves with things to consider. After all, it isn't really important to know how the text critiques the tradition. That's just a starting point. We want to know how we should live, e.g. what the political and ethical implications of this sort of thinking are.

Let's begin with his opening paragraph:

WHY ARE THERE beings at all instead of nothing? That is the question. Presumably it is no arbitrary question. “Why are there beings at all instead of nothing?”—this is obviously the first of all questions. Of course, it is not the first question in the chronological sense. Individuals as well as peoples ask many questions in the course of their historical passage through time. They explore, investigate, and test many sorts of things before they run into the question, “Why are there beings at all instead of nothing?” Many never run into this question at all, if running into the question means not only hearing and reading the interrogative sentence as uttered, but asking the question, that is, taking a stand on it, posing it, compelling oneself into the state of this questioning.

Right away, we should be wondering how what else we have read for today might bear on this. So Heidegger makes a few huge claims here. "Why are there beings at all instead of nothing?" is the "first of all questions," he says. It isn't "chronological," but you will run into this whether you are an individual or a people. Can we put this into dialogue with the personal journey Khakpour recounts in "Just (Don't) Do It?" Do you feel she ran into this question, or did she run into other questions? Also: what do we make of Heidegger's invocation of "individuals" and "peoples" and "historical passage" versus Khakpour's account? Is something distinct happening in Khakpour's journey of self-revelation that Heidegger can or can't account for?

We can also consider what is going on Kay Ryan's "Turtle." If we are to learn the way of being and seeing of an animal, how does this fundamental question of Heidegger's address that? Or can it not address it at all?

Obviously you will not be able to read every passage this way. But the goal of this class is to come out with better questions. And I want you to do the reading to find the key passages which resonate with you and start building a necessary dialogue. I'll leave you with this: What do we want to make of "compelling oneself into the state of this questioning," not merely asking a question for an answer, but seemingly something else entirely?

References

Heidegger, Martin. Introduction to Metaphysics. (New Haven: Yale, 2000). p. 1