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Substance, Utility, Existence: Heidegger’s Modes of Being
Martin Heidegger, the 20th century German philosopher, believed that for thousands of years human beings had misidentified the nature of what it means ‘to be.” From the time of the great Greek thinkers the fundamental nature of ‘being’ was thought to be substance. All of reality was made up of substances. In other words, we live in a universe made of ‘stuff’ of one kind or another.
This doesn’t make you necessarily a materialist. A materialist believes that the stuff that the entire universe is made of is physical in nature. An idealist believes that the stuff that the universe is made up of is mind. In either case mind or matter are both thought of in terms of being a substance – a kind of stuff. Martin Heidegger believed that there were actually three modes of being. Substance was one of them and the other two could be thought of as utility and existence.
The first mode of being is substance. A substance is a kind of stuff and that stuff has certain properties and characteristics. Wood is a substance. It has certain properties and characteristics. It has hardness, it burns, etc. The properties of a substance are intrinsic to that substance.
The second mode of being is utility and this has to do with “being for something.” It is the mode of being a tool or equipment. Heidegger’s famous example is a hammer. As a substance, a hammer is a piece of wood with another piece of shaped metal on one end. The ‘substance’ of the hammer has intrinsic properties. It has heaviness, it has smoothness on its surfaces, etc. But those intrinsic characteristics do not make it a hammer. This object only becomes a hammer when it is recognized to be a hammer by someone who knows what it is used for and lives in a world which would allow it to be used. The characteristics of the mode of being of the hammer’s utility are not intrinsic to the hammer – they are contextual to the entity that would use it and the world in which it would be used. A hammer is just a piece of wood and metal until it appears in a world with people who know how to use it and are capable of using it. Then it becomes a hammer.
Imagine a computer that somehow was left in the jungle among a primitive tribe that had no idea about what a computer is and lacks the electricity to run it. It isn’t a computer in that world, it is just a thing. Maybe someone will use it as a table. Then it will become a table and not be a computer at all. If someone from a developed countery came to that village they would recognize the object for what it could be, but in order to turn it back into a computer that person would have to bring it back into the world that had the electricity to run it so that it could become a computer once again.
The third mode of being Heidegger talks about as ‘existence’ and he reserves this mode of being only for self-reflective beings that are able to “take a stand on their being.” Human beings for instance can take a stand – can choose – to be a particular kind of human being. We can be doctors, mothers, carpenters, teachers, friends, enemies – and all of these are modes of being. We act differently depending on which one of these we take a stand on – or identify ourselves with. So the mode of being of ‘existence’ is the mode of being of ‘being able to identity with a mode of being.’ The characteristics of the mode of being of existence are not merely intrinsic to the person or contextual to the circumstances – they are at least in part chosen – consciously or unconsciously – as a stand, an identity that is being adopted. Perhaps we could say that the mode of being of existence is the ability to take on different modes of being.
Heidegger believed that understanding that there were actually three modes of being and not merely one was the solution to many of humanities philosophical problems. In his masterwork, Being & Time, he tries to work out at least some of these solutions.
It is great you bring Heidegger up. I am looking at Foucault and Sartre at the moment, and they both are influenced by him –even though they took a different path.
It is the first time that I look at philosopher that directly influenced my own thinking structures and the funny thing is that every time I read some characteristic, parts of my past come up where a particular ‘grove’ of thought was created. Foucault calls it, the depth-structure of knowing of a specific period, and according to him in those periods it is not possible to step outside it. What I find in both of them, and this roots in Heidegger, is the idea of self-creation. This had two sides: we should recognize anything that stood in the way, any form of oppression, steering, authority, which I think is more of our ‘epistème’, not so much Heidegger’s. But the other side, the ego as conscious self-creation as ‘object’. Sartre says: we shouldn’t say ‘my consciousness (subject) but ‘consciousness of me’(object)’.’ This is turning ‘subject into object’ and the importance that we gave this is definitely central to our episteme. I especially love reading about Foucault. I think he was for Green what Wilber is for Integral. I never understood why I saw ‘Salo’ of Passolini three times, until now that I read that Foucault was inspired by ‘De Sade’. I had a teacher in that time making movies (about homosexuality=Foucault) that everybody hated (winning prizes though). I was almost lynched after showing it to an audience, I never forgot the kind of aggression that came up. One could only watch them with an empty but open mind, without any expectation and willing to built up a new language for cinema, deeply rooted in symbols. Now I see that is totally Foucault, saying all stories, expressions en rules of a culture are embedded in the language, it brings forth values and morals: in our language are the rules that powerfully control human behavior. Freud was great, now I read Foucault was inspired by Freud etc. Wilber is right that all roots go back to him.
According to Sartre there is no ego-consciousness, only consciousness of the ego. The ego is a synthesis of interiority and transcendence. Pure interiority can only be lived, not contemplated. The ‘I’ is the ideal unity of actions, the ‘Me’ is that of states and qualities. I have his book ‘Being and Nothingness’ in front of me and I am planning to dive into that (and into my thinking structures) this weekend.
I appreciate all attempts to digest Heidegger and put him in everyday language. The context of modes of being does that. However, I miss the citations to the quoted material, insofar as this is the first time I have encountered the idea of three modes of being, apart from his own insistence on language, mood, and understanding.
I am far from an expert on Heidegger, but I am enthrawled by his thinking and attempting to attempt what I learn. In Being and Time Heidegger talks about the ontology of substance and he also talks about the way of being of equipment which is where he uses the hammer as an example. Of course he also discusses Dasein as the way of being of being human. It is Dasein that must take a stand on its being. Most of my understanding does not come directly from heidegger, but from the American Scholar Hubert Dreyfus who wrote a comentary called Being in the World. I would appreciate hearing any thoughts you have about Heidegger’s ideas.
I just found such a beautiful piece in Ken Wilber’s work (a brief history of everything) about the line Kierkegaard, Heidegger, existentialism, that I really would like to copy it here.
First there is a bit more about Foucault which I think clarifies two roots of the longing for freedom in Green (and for example interest in De Sade): one study he did was about insanity: he said that because science did so very well define all insanities, our view of ‘what it means to be a human being’ was restricted. Certain behavior could not be includes because it was already labeled.
Another important point of him was about power: in former times he said, power was shown by punishment. But since 19th century a power was created that gives us the feeling that we are constantly ‘observed’ . The old system had a prison, but now it is the whole population. It is not king or country that manipulates, it is the school, the army, the hospital. They all have a disciplinary function.
This is what Wilber writes when talking about vision logic: ‘ as Kierkegaard put it, the self can no longer tranquilize itself with the trivial. The emergence of this more authentic or existential self is the primary task of this level. The finite self is going to die -magic will not save it , mythic gods will not save it, mythic gods will not save it, rational science will not save it- and facing that cutting fact is part of becoming authentic.
This was on of Heidegger’s constant points. Coming to terms with one’s mortality and one’s finitude -this is part of finding one’s own authentic being-in-the-world (authentic agency-in-communion).
The existentialists have beautifully analyzed this authentic self, the actual centauric self -its characteristics, its mode of being, its stance in the world- and most important, they have analyzed the common lies and bad faith that sabotage this authenticity. We lie about our mortality and finitude by constructing immortality symbols- vain attempts to beat time and exist everlasting in some mythic heaven, some rational project, some great artwork, through which we project our incapacity to face death. We lie about the responsibility for our own choices, preferring to see ourselves as passive victims of some outside force. We lie about the richness of the present by projecting ourselves backwards in guilt and forward in anxiety. We lie about our fundamental responsibility by hiding in the herd mentality, getting lost in the Other. In place of the authentic or actual self, we live as the inauthentic self, the false self, fashioning its projects of deception to hide itself from the shocking truth of existence.
Than he comes to a point which actually I came to myself last night, I remember it deeply: ‘
There was a grim atmosphere among the existential writers. Yeah, this is classically the home of existential dread, despair, angst, fear and trembling, sickness unto death, precisely because you have lost all the comforting consolidations! (”)
BECAUSE THE EXISTENTIALISTS DID NOT RECOGNIZE NO SPHERE OF CONSCIOUSNESS HIGHER THAN THIS, THEY ARE STUCK WITH THE EXISTENTIAL WORLDVIEW, WHICH LIMITS THEIR PERCEPTIONS TO WITHIN ITS HORIZON.
So they make it something of a point of honor to embrace drab existential nightmares with dreadful seriousness (..) This existential embeddedness becomes your point of reference for all reality. The more angst you can display, the more authentic you are….Never let them see you smile, or that will divulge your inauthenticity.
Existentialism is, in part, a reaction to Romanticism with its guarantee of happy Hollywood endings. But recall that Camus’ Sisyphus has a smile on his lips as he descends the mountain to pursue his boulder. He knows his condition and that knowledge can become a point of pride. Or as Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in the mid-19th Century, in the essay titled, “Fate,” “In the history of the individual is always an account of his condition, and he knows himself to be party to his present estate.”
What I was so surprised about, was the influence philosophers have on us without we being aware of it. Years ago I read in Boomeritis of Wilber that Foucault had been of great influence on Green and only now, seeing the connection I thought of the fact that the teacher I followed for three years studied in France, either with him or in that tradition, but somehow it connected to my line of thought, which was influenced by Sartre and De Beauvoir. Only now I see the precise connection, even though I already saw it when reading Boomeritis. I was shocked then to see how non-authentic I was; one off the aspects of Green is being original. A funny story is that due to problems at work I was officialy treated for ‘problems with authority’, which meant digging in the personal. That is why Integral is great, from every corner that one looks there is influence. I never looked at these influences pointed at above and I was totally surprised by them.
A long time ago, when I worked with Werner Erhard – he became quite obsessed with Heidegger’s work. At the time – I was working 18+ hours a day, so wasn’t reading and studying at the time.
The work we were doing at est – (later Landmark) I can see now – had strong roots in the 3rd mode of being. At the core – we were creating who we were as a stand – as a context that would generate a transformation in the content of what we were dealing with.
Thank you so much for writing this – I had no idea where such a core element of the work came from.
Patricia
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