Oblivion of being
Forgetting of being (also being abandoned ) is a term used by the philosopher Martin Heidegger to describe various aspects of Western metaphysics, science and philosophy. For Heidegger, the forgetting of being manifests itself primarily in the fact that the ontological difference is not taken into account, i. H. the difference between being and being.
The question of being in "Being and Time"
The term applies to a large number of observations, the first essential mention can be found in “Being and Time” , even if Heidegger does not yet choose the title of “Being forgotten”. In Being and Time , Heidegger fixes the forgetfulness of being to the failure to ask about the meaning of being. A question which, according to Heidegger, has been forgotten and for which an understanding must first be awakened. According to Heidegger, a fundamental ontological investigation of Dasein (Heidegger's term for human beings) is required to enable the uncovering of being .
Dasein turns out to be forgotten in “Being and Time”, for example, because it usually only understands itself “out of the world”, that is, its interpretation of the world reflects back on self-interpretation: Dasein is understood as a thing among things and forget about this, that it's actually existential constitution that is only in the implementation of life is . Heidegger also sees this implementation mainly shaped by cultural forms of understanding and perception to which existence is usually not consciously related and which is, as it were, "lived" along these patterns. Heidegger contrasts this forgotten “falling into the one”, that is, the absorption in clichés of speech and thinking, with a concept of “actually being able to be oneself”.
Furthermore, the effort made in “Being and Time” is directed against the Cartesian subjectivity , which Heidegger contrasts with being-in-the-world. By means of being-in-the-world, Heidegger describes what it is like to be existence and thus wants to show that the Descartian subject-object split , or the independent existence of world and existence, is phenomenologically untenable.
Expressions
metaphysics
According to Heidegger, the oblivion of being begins in Western philosophy with Plato, who in his dialogues of ideas only approaches ideas as real beings and thus understands the world as derived from this highest being. Finally, Aristotle will, in a certain similarity to Plato, trace being back to substance : only reality comes to it and all other meanings of being are then to be traced back to substance, be it existence, reality / possibility, truth / falsehood, cause or other Categories. It is precisely this tracing back to a single being (ontological reductionism) that constitutes Heidegger's metaphysical forgetting of being.
Regardless of this, according to Heidegger, a basic tendency can be identified in metaphysics to speak only of things as present , in the sense of mere "matter". Substance and matter, however, have few references and have no meaningful relation to other things in the world, as is the case with tools, for example: the hammer refers to the nail and this to the board for building a house. That what he is determined only in a world as meaning wholeness and the essence of the hammer can only be understood in terms of its future use - so it turns out that for the determination of being the hammer, the time is essential. Objects of use, on the other hand, do not appear in an ontology that only accepts timeless, eternal substance as reality. In order to make this problem explicit, Heidegger differentiates in “Being and Time” between what is available and what is at hand (e.g. tools). For Heidegger, a hammer is primarily characterized by its meaningful relationship to people and other things in the world. This is what constitutes his being. Only when it is stripped of the network of relationships - for example, by being placed on a scale for the purpose of measuring its weight - does it become a mere mass thing. Traditionally, metaphysics only allowed the latter to become reality, while Heidegger reversed the relationship, so to speak: "At hand is the ontological-categorical determination of being as it is" in itself "." Heidegger tries to understand being from where we are we have always been there , albeit in a philosophically reflected way: by “destroying” traditional metaphysical concepts.
"Humanism"
Closely related to Heidegger's criticism of metaphysics is the accusation of forgetting being , which is directed against humanism . For Heidegger, however, “humanism” does not mean any historical humanism in its honest endeavor for people, but rather the metaphysical image of humanity in humanism. In the letter on "humanism" Heidegger writes:
- “Every determination of the essence of man that already presupposes the interpretation of beings without the question of the truth of being (...) is metaphysical. Then, with regard to the way in which the essence of man is determined, the essence of all metaphysics becomes apparent in the fact that it is 'humanistic'. Accordingly, all humanism remains metaphysical ”.
For Heidegger, then, humanism is the metaphysically forgotten interpretation of the essence of man. It occurs in various historical forms, such as historical, Christian, Marxian and Sartrian humanism. Each of these conceptions is based on a metaphysical paradigm; H. an upstream interpretation of beings and the world, from where it then seeks to determine the essence of man, the humanitas .
What they all have in common is the determination of man as a rational animal . Heidegger criticizes the combination of human beings from animal and ratio , that is from animal and reason: the starting point is the metaphysical assumption of human beings as animals, to whom reason, as it were, accidentally belongs. According to Heidegger, through this “assembly” of the human being, the essence of the human being cannot be grasped. The central point for humans is not their biological relationship to animals, but rather their relationship to being.
Here, too, Heidegger's conception of the forgetting of being changes: If this was previously essentially determined by the non-observance of the ontological difference, then the forgetting of being after the turn shows itself more as abandonment of being . While Heidegger in “Being and Time” still assumes in his understanding of truth that it can be traced back to the disclosure of existence, he later understands truth as an occurrence that occurs naturally from within . In order to overcome the forgetfulness of being, man is then dependent on the truth of being and that it turns to him. Since the forgetfulness of being is no longer a failure of the human being, but is based on the withdrawal of being, Heidegger occasionally also speaks of abandonment of being to make this clear .
religion
Regarding religion implies the notion that in the thinking of ontotheology His was equated with being and this uncreated by God as ens creatum, is seen as. Alternatively, being is identified with God at all. Both are expressions of being forgotten, since such thinking does not allow things to be shown by themselves in their being, but rather imposes an interpretation on them in advance, e.g. B. that of being created.
science
“Science does not think.” This sentence from Heidegger's lecture “What does thinking mean?” Caused a sensation at the time. Heidegger would like to express that science analyzes, explains, justifies and calculates beings, but does not think about being as a horizon of interpretation. Being can be described here as a horizon of understanding, on the background of which the objects of investigation of science, beings, appear. However, this horizon of understanding itself does not become a problem for science, but remains unthematic. Heidegger sees the task of philosophy in making these prerequisites a topic, especially since science cannot think of this itself . Heidegger: “You cannot use the methods of physics to say what physics is. I can only think what physics is. "
For Heidegger, “thinking” means thinking about being in a double sense: on the one hand, thinking thinks according to being and, on the other hand, it “belongs” to being - since truth arises from being. If science, as Heidegger says, “does not think”, then this means that it does not think about being, has been forgotten about being. Instead, she only deals with concrete individual phenomena, with beings. However, science cannot address the whole into which the individual objects examined are integrated, i.e. the world as a whole of meaning. However, the being of individual beings is also determined by the world or being: whether a person perceives the mere feeling of toothache as a punishment from God, as perhaps in the Middle Ages, or as bacterial inflammation, depends on the world in which he is lives. However, science cannot address this world, or being as a whole - or, if it does, it would already be thinking , philosophy.
Forget about being and history of being
As already mentioned above, Heidegger tries, according to “Being and Time”, to think of man's relation to being as having occurred through the truth of being. A historical event is connected with this, depending on how being showed itself to man at what time. Being, in the light of everything that exists can meet only seen epochal-historic man on his own in unterschiedlichster way. Man cannot simply “produce” or deduce a new view of the world on his own, because there is no ultimate reason that, from a philosophical point of view, secures truth . A last great attempt to prepare such a ground was the Cartesian subject , which, in its continuation with Kant, was to secure the knowledge of nature through transcendental categories. Heidegger sees this attempt as a failure, just like any other philosophy that binds its knowledge to ultimate reasons and causes must fail.
Instead, he turns to the history of philosophy, which he sees as being shaped by the relationship between man and being. This shows and evades the human being at the same time, so that epochal different "interpretations" of what is , of being, are produced. The epochs are characterized by the fact that in each of them an important thinker has dedicated himself to being and has brought being to language in his philosophy . Now, according to Heidegger, humans cannot dispose of their own progress in knowledge, but are dependent on the “encouragement of being”. The individual philosophers can only speak about being to the extent that it reveals itself to man. One should not misunderstand, however, that for Heidegger in this context “being” is something like an entity that exercises its fateful rule over people. Heidegger's thinking in the history of his being represents the attempt to think of a development in the history of the spirit that is no longer based on the basic assumption of a single, eternally valid truth and interprets everything that has happened on the basis of this. Hannah Arendt aptly formulates Heidegger's eightieth birthday: "Heidegger doesn't think about something , Heidegger thinks something ."
For Heidegger, in the history of being, the “cultural process” presents itself as a process of decay, in which an original relationship between human beings and being, as Heidegger saw it with the pre-Socratics , is buried. The increasing forgetfulness of being is not due to a lack or failure of the human being, but rather lies in the nature of the thing: where there is no longer a subject, according to which - as Kant put it - nature has to act, then truth cannot be established become. The human being can only keep himself open for the "encouragement of being", by which Heidegger means a special mental attitude that neither imposes an idealistic interpretation on things nor only brings things into view from their material side. To understand what something is, you need the right distance that gives things the space to appear for what they are. Man can then keep himself open for the arrival of being alone . This attitude is shaped beyond activity and passivity by a basic mood , through which openness is first guaranteed. Heidegger sees this basic mood as a fear of the event.
Following Heidegger's division of the history of being into epochs, the age according to Nietzsche is the epoch in which the forgetting of being is most pronounced. This can be seen in the spreading nihilism , which Heidegger sees in the form of technology. According to Heidegger, technology does not allow things to appear in their being, but always only presents them under the standards applied to them, i.e. by linking them back to the standards given by the subject. However, humans cannot programmatically accept this and overcome the one-sidedness of modern nihilism, because how and at what should they focus instead? Heidegger:
- "We do not think yet because what is to be thought turns away from people and by no means only because people do not sufficiently turn to what is to be thought."
Heidegger's thinking therefore remains a preparation for a possibly coming event in which the human being leaves the forgetfulness of being behind and finds an original relation to being again, i.e. H. understands itself determined by this. The preparation consists on the one hand in the destruction of traditional metaphysics, on the other hand in looking for a basic mood that would not be the self-confidence of a subject who presumes to locate everything under its categories and thus as always known , but a shyness which meets the new with the concern not to ignore this in its peculiarities.