"A Preliminary Sketch of Being-in-the-World, Section I: Being-in" by Hubert Dryfus

The opening section of the third chapter of Hubert Dryfus’ treatise on Being and Time concerns itself with explaining the “being-in” of Dasein. Dryfus tells us “Heidegger calls the activity of existing, ‘being-in-the-world.’” (40) He then sets out distinguishing “being-in-the-world” as an existential concept rather than the more common reading, one might suspect, of the term as referring to a metaphysical concept. As one might suspect, a good chunk of this explanation turns on his discussion of the “being-in” part of “being-in-the-world”.

Dryfus begins by noting the priority with which we treat “in” as it refers an object contained within another object in space. He goes on to juxtapose this common interpretation of the preposition against the “primordial sense of ‘in’ [which] is ‘to reside’, ‘to dwell’.” (42) To dwell and reside are active ways of being, Operating with this understanding we are faced with the problem of being first, and objective in-ness only afterwards. Thus the usual manner of understanding “in” as a relationship between objects is not basic but subsidiary to being-in-the-world.

This distinguishing exercise is supplemented by a discussion on the distinction between what Dryfus calls the metaphorical/literal distinction in language. One reading of Heidegger’s concept of being-in has it that “in” is used metaphorically. This view has it that “being in trouble” is metaphorical since one cannot literally be in trouble: trouble is not one thing in which another can occupy space. This reading misses the take-home message regarding being-in as relating to residing and actively engaging. “Heidegger wants us to see that at an early stage of language the distinction metaphorical/literal has not yet emerged.” (42) Being in trouble is not only metaphorical, it is also contextually definable in the being which finds itself troubled in the world.

From here Dryfus turns towards relating being-in to being-in-the-world. “Being-in as being involved is definitive of Dasein.” (43) As such, Dasein is by defined by its involvement in a world. Further, “Dasein alone can be touched, that is, moved, by objects and other Daseins,” and it is due to the involvement of Dasein with objects and other Daseins that Dasein comes to acquire know-how. “Not only is Dasein's activity conditioned by cultural interpretations of facts about its body, such as being male or female, but since Dasein must define itself in terms of social roles that require certain activities, and since its roles require equipment, Dasein is at the mercy of factual events and objects in its environment. (44)” This last point is what pushes us from being-in to being-in-the world, what we have translated as being-alongside and what Dreyfus calls being-amidst: “What Heidegger is getting at is a mode of being-in we might call "inhabiting." When we inhabit something, it is no longer an object for us but becomes part of us and pervades our relation to other objects in the world.“ (45) This pervasive feature of my objects as they relate to my being and other beings has been obscured by the tradition, even though it “is Dasein's basic way of being-in-the-world.” (45)


"A Preliminary Sketch of Being-in-the-World, Section I: Being-in" by Hubert Dryfus in Being-in-the-world : A Commentary On Heidegger's Being and Time, Division I, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991.

The Tragic Sense of Life; Ch. IV

"And it was around this dogma, inwardly experienced by Paul, the dogma of the resurrection and immortality of Christ, the guarantee of the resurrection and immortality of each believer, that the whole of Christology was built up." pp. 56

"And the end of redemption ... was to save us from death ... or from sin [only] in so far as sin implies death." pp.57

"[W]hich is the real Christ? Is it, indeed, that so-called historical Christ of rationalist exegesis who is diluted for us in a myth or in a social atom?" pp.57

"Athanasius had the supreme audacity of faith, that of asserting things mutualy contradictory..." pp. 58

"In truth, [Catholic dogma] drew closer to life, which is contra-rational and opposed to clear thinking. Not only are judgements of worth never rationalizable -- they are anit-rational." pp.58

"Fundamentally [the Sacrament of the Eucharist] is concerned with ... the eating and drinking of God, the Eternalizer, the feeding upon Him." pp.59 This passage comes off as hellishly metal to me.

Funny quote from St. Teresa (one of 'em; not ours): "for I had told him how much I delighted in Hosts of a large size. Yet I was not ignorant that the size of the Host is of no moment, for I knew that our Lord is whole and entire in the smallest particle." pp.59-60

"It was from Kant, in spite of what orthodox Protestants may think of him, that Protestantism derived its penultimate conclusions--namely, that religion rests upon morality, and not morality upon religion, as in Catholicism." pp. 60

"For my part, I cannot conceive the liberty of a heart or the tranquillity of a conscience that are not sure of their perdurability after death." pp. 62

"[T]he highest artistic expression of Catholicism, or at least of Spanish Catholicism, is in the art that is most material, tangible, and permanent ... in sculpture and painting, in the Christ of Velasquez, that Christ who is for ever dying, yet never finishes dying, in order that he may give us life." pp. 62-3 I love that last part.

"No modern religion can leave ethics on one side." pp. 63 How many contemporary ethical theories have left religion to the side?

A doubtlessly honest yet disturbing comment: "And Christ said: "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do," and there is no man who perhaps knows what he does. But it has been necessary, for the benefit of the social order, to convert religion into a kind of police system, and hence hell." pp. 63, emphasis added

"The gravest sin is not to obey the Church, whose infallibility protects us from reason." pp. 64, yet who will save us from the Church if that is where our faith lies? No one. No some. Only natural destruction in such a case, and we are bound to experience that!

Wow: "The Church defends life. It stood up against Galileo, and it did right; for his discovery, in its inception and until it became assimilated to the general body of human knowledge, tended to shatter the anthropomorphic belief that the universe was created for man." pp. 64, is there any wonder why conceptual and technological advances were in such short supply during the Middle Ages and the reign of the Church? And this is a terribly intelligent theological perspective.

"Do not the Modernists see that the question at issue is not so much that of the immortal life of Christ, reduced, perhaps, to a life in the collective Christian consciousness, as that of a guarantee of our own personal resurrection of body as well as soul?" pp. 65, I think Harry Frankfurt has some pertinent material concerning what is playing out in the background of this comment.

"Here you have the Catholic hall-mark--the deduction of the truth of a principle from its supreme goodness or utility. And what is there of greater, of more sovereign utility, than the immortality of the soul?" pp. 66

"[Religion] feared the excesses of the imagination which was supplanting faith and creating gnostic extravagances. But it had to sign a kind of pact with gnosticism and another with rationalism; neither imagination nor reason allowed itself to be completely vanquished. Amd thus the body of Catholic dogma became a system of contradictions, more or less successfully harmonized." pp. 68

Tragic Sense of Life; Ch. V

"The truth is ... that what we call materialism means for us nothing else but the doctrine which denies the immortality of the individual soul, the persistence of personal consciousness after deat." pp. 71

"And there is nothing that remains the same for two successive moments of its existence. My idea of God is different each time that I conceive it. Identity, which is death, is the goal of the intellect. The mind seeks what is dead, for what is living escapes it; it seeks to congeal the flowing stream in blocks of ice; it seeks to arrest it. In order to analyze a body it is necessary to extenuate or destroy it. In order to understand anything it is necessary to kill it, to lay it out rigid in the mind. Science is a cemetery of dead ideas, even though life may issue from them. Worms also feed upon corpses. My own thoughts, tumultuous and agitated in the innermost recesses of my soul, once they are torn from their roots in the heart, poured out on this paper and there fixed in unalterable shape, are already only the corpses of thoughts." pp. 80

"To think is to converse with oneself; and speech is social, and social are thought and logic. But may they not perhaps possess a content, an individual matter, incommunicable and untranslatable? And may not this be the source of their power?" pp. 80, perhaps this is a key feature of natural, as to compared to, say, formal, language.

"Hence it follows that the theological or advocatory spirit is in its principle dogmatical, while the strictly scientific and purely rational spirit is sceptical, that is, investigative." pp. 81-2

Tragic Sense of Life; Ch. VI

"We have seen that the vital longing for human immortality finds no consolation in reason and that reason leaves us without incentive or consolation in life and life itself without real finality. But here, in the depths of the abyss, the despair of the heart and of the will and the scepticism of reason meet face to face and embrace like brothers... Scepticism, uncertainty -- the position to which reason, by practising its analysis upon itself, upon its own validity, at last arives -- is the foundation upon which the heart's dispair must build up its hope." pp. 94

"We must make of [the war between our reason and our feelings], of war itself, the very condition of spiritual life." pp. 94

"[Life's] sole formula is: all or nothing. Feeling does not compound its differences with middle terms." pp. 95

"The methodical doubt of Descartes is ... purely theoretical and provisional... [Descartes] framed for himself a provisional ethic... the first law of which was to observe the customs of his country and to keep always to the religion in which, by the grace of God, he had been instructed from his infancy, governing himself in all things according to the most moderate opinions. Yes, exactly, a provisional religion and even a provisional God! And he chose the most moderate opinions 'because these are always the most convenient for practice.'" pp. 94-5

"[The] rationalist takes away our fever by taking away our life, and promises us, instead of a concrete, an abstract immortality, as if the hunger for immortality that consumes us were an abstract and not a concrete hunger!" pp. 98

"We shall see presently that to believe is, in the first instance, to wish to believe." pp. 100

"The will and the intelligence seek opposite ends: that we may absorb the world into ourselves, appropriate it to ourselves, is the aim of the will; that we may be absorbed into the world, that of the intelligence... The intelligence is monist or pantheist, the will monotheist or egoist." pp. 101

"[To] believe in the immortality of the soul is to wish that the soul may be immortal, but to wish it with such force that this volition shall trample reason under foot and pass beyond it. But reason has its revenge." pp. 102

"Nothing is sure. Everything is elusive and in the air." pp.104

"Because he believes--that is to say, because he wishes to believe, because he has need that his son should be cured--he beseeches the Lord to help his unbelief, his doubt that such a cure could be effectd. Of such kind is human faith" pp. 106

"Sufro yo a tu costa,
Dios no existiente, pues si tu' existieras
existieri'a yo tambien de veras." pp. 107

Tragic Sense of Life; Ch. VIII

"[W]e have at times the direct feeling of God, above all in mooments of spiritual suffocation. And this feeling--mark it well, for all that is tragic in it and the whole tragic sense of life is founded upon this--this feeling is a feeling of hunger for God, of the lack of God. To believe in God is, in the first instance, as we shall see, to wish that there may be a God, to be unable to live without Him." pp. 149

"And God does not exist, but rather super-exists, and He is sustaining our existence, existing us (existie'ndonos)." pp. 149

"God is and reveals Himself in collectivity. And God is the richest and most personal of human conceptions." pp. 150

"The concept that is most extensive and at the same time least comprehensive is that of being or of thing, which embraces everything that exists and possesses no other distinguishing quality than that of being... And the logical or rational God, the God obtained by way of negation, the absolute entity, merges, like reality itself, into nothingness; for, as Hegel pointed out, pure being and pure nothingness are identical." pp. 150

"And there may be a truer revelation in superstition itself than in theology. The venerable Father of the long beard and white locks who appears among the clouds carrying the globe in his hand is more living and more real than the ens realissimum of theodicy." pp. 157

"In its etymological signification to exist is to be outside of ourselves, outside of our mind: ex-sistere. But is there anything outside of our mind, outside of our consciousness which embraces the sum of the known? Undoubtedly there is. The matter of knowledge comes to us from without. And what is the mode of this matter? It is impossible for us to know, for to know is to clothe matter with form, and hence we cannot know the formless as formless. To do so would be tantamount to investing chaos with order." pp. 161

"We wish not only to save ourselves, but to save the world from nothingness. And therefore God. Such is His finality as we feel it." pp. 162

"If [the supposition of objectified reason without will and feeling] is reality, our life is deprived of sense and value.
It is not, therefore, rational necessity, but vital anguish that impels us to believe in God. And to believe in God is, before and above all, to feel a hunger for God, a hunger for divinity, to be sensible of His lack and absence, to wish that God may exist." pp. 162

Personification:
"This eternal and eternalizing person who gives meaning--and I will add, a human meaning, for there isnone other--to the Universe, is it a substantial something, existing independently of our consciousness, independently of our desire? Here we arrive at the insoluble, and it is best that it should be so. Let it suffice for reason that it cannot prove the impossibility of His existence." pp. 163

Tragic Sense of Life; Ch. 1 excerpts

From Spinoza:

"Everything, in so far as it is in itself, endeavors to persist in its own being. [Also] the endeavour wherewith everything endeavours to persist in its own being is nothing but the actual essence of the thing itself. [...] The endeavour whereby each individual thing endeavours to persist involves no finite time but indefinite time. That is to say that you, I, and Spinoza wish never to die and that this longing of ours never to die is our actual essence."

"To propose to a man that he should be someone else, that he should become someone else, is to propose to him that he should cease to be himself."

"... for me the becoming other than I am, the breaking of the unity and continuity of any life, is to cease to be he who I am--that is to say, it is simply to cease to be. And that--no! Anything rather than that!"


"The values we are discussing are, as you see, values of the heart, and against values of the heart reasons do not avail. For reasons are only reasons--that is to say, they are not even truths. There is a class of pedantic label-mongers, pedants by nature and by grace, who remind me of that man who, purposing to console a father whose son has suddenly died in the flower of his years, says to him, "Patience, my friend, we all must die!" Would you think it strange if this father were offended at such an impertinence? For it is an impertinence. There are times when even an axiom can become an impertinence."

"Little can be hoped from a ruler... who has not at some time or other been preoccupied, even if only confusedly, with the first beginning and the ultimate end of all things, and above all of man, with the "why" of his origin and the "wherefore" of his destiny."

"It is not enough to think about our destiny: it must be felt."

"So far as I am concerned, I will never willingly yield myself, nor entrust my confidence, to any popular leader who is not penetrated with the feeling that he who orders a people orders men, men of flesh and bone, men who are born, suffer, and, although they do not wish to die, die; men who are ends in themselves, not merely means; men who must be themselves and not others; men, in fine, who seek that which we call happiness. It is inhuman, for example, to sacrifice one generation of men to the generation which follows, without having any feeling for the destiny of those who are sacrificed, without having any regard, not for their memory, not for their names, but for them themselves."

"The chiefest sanctity of a temple is that it is a place to which men go to weep in common... Yes, we must learn to weep!"

"...man, by the very fact of being a man, of possessing consciousness, is, in comparison with the ass or the crab, a diseased animal. Consciousness is a disease."