The connection between situatedness and questionability is central to the argument of Being and Time, and Heidegger’s claim in that work that the question of being can be approached only through an investigation of that mode of being that is our own is not based in some point concerning our epistemological “access” to being nor in any subjectivist assumption. It is rather questionability as such that brings the question of being and our own being together. The question of being concerns the question as to how being can itself be put in question, and this immediately brings our own “situated” being into view since, in its essence, it is only in relation to such situatedness that the questionability of being arises as an issue. One might argue that this way of putting things elides the difference between the way in which what is at issue for beings like us is the question of our own being as such. However, not only is the question of being as such inseparable from the question of being as it arises in respect of any specific being (the ontological difference can itself be seen as affirming this point), but so too does all of our questioning already presuppose a question about our own being (a familiar hermeneutic point more commonly put in terms of the way in which all understanding involves self-understanding). In general, then, we can say that the question of being already concerns the being of the question, and, in this respect, the question of being and the question of the nature of our own being, of situatedness, must always be intertwined. As a result, the way in which our being is at stake in the question of being, and so the way in which we are ourselves involved in that question, has to do not with the mere fact that it is we who happen to ask the question, but rather with the way in which we are already given over to such questioning at the same time as we are given over to being. Moreover, to be given over in this way is to find ourselves already given over to a certain situatedness, to a world, to a “there.” It is to find ourselves already gathered into place. In this respect, we may say that questionability always presupposes topos, while topos always presupposes questionability. Furthermore, the questionability at issue here is not one to be satisfied by finding any simple answer—as if it were a matter of finding something that “corresponded” to being that being properly “is,” or finding the one “place” in which we are ourselves finally to be “located.” In fact the questionability at issue is such that it can never be dispelled. In a way that will become evident as the discussion proceeds, it is not a matter of “answering” the question of being, so much as recognizing that being and questionability belong together.
The fact of the essential questionability of our situatedness does not imply, however, that such situatedness cannot be covered over or forgotten. Indeed, for the most part, it remains hidden behind our everyday engagement with things. Many of the “phenomenological exercises” that appear in Heidegger’s early lectures are thus designed to enable his students to recover a sense of the situatedness in which they already find themselves and so also to gain a sense of the appropriate starting point for their own philosophical investigations. Outside of the philosophy lecture, however, such situatedness may also become apparent to us in a more spontaneous fashion through our own moods and affectivity—through the way we “find ourselves” (what Heidegger calls in Being and Time, “Befindlichkeit” and which is translated by Macquarrie and Robinson as “state-of-mind”). Boredom is one of the ways in which we can find ourselves in the world, and, in boredom, the world and our situatedness in the world come to evidence in a striking way through the way in which nothing in the world seems to matter to us. Of course, in boredom it is not that nothing matters, but rather that the only thing that seems to matter is that the world appears as not mattering to us. In this sense, boredom provides one way into philosophical questioning—one way into a grasp of our prior situatedness. Boredom is one of the modes of finding ourselves in the world that is of interest to Heidegger in his thinking in the period up until the mid-1930s1 (see the discussion in sec. 4.3), as is anxiety (Angst), which is of particular importance in Being and Time, and wonder (in German, “Wunder,” in Greek, “thauma” or, to use the verb form, thaumazein).2 It is wonder, however, that takes on more significance in the later writing,3 although it also seems evident even in Heidegger’s early thinking— for instance, in his reference to the passage from Antigone in which he contrasts the phenomenon of the sunrise as it is investigated by the astronomer with the experience of the sunrise as expressed in the words of the Greek chorus “Thou most beautiful, glance of the sun, / That upon seven-gated Thebes / So long shines. . . .”4 We may say that in trying to reawaken our sense of our originary “situatedness,” Heidegger is also concerned to reconnect us with a sense of the urgency and genuineness of our own lives—to reconnect philosophy with the personal, lived experience that gives it real motive and direction.
Part of the task that Heidegger sets himself, then, is not merely an investigation of the character of our situatedness and its essential structure, but also of its retrieval (one may say that this is another aspect of the connection between situatedness and questionability). Indeed, the task of retrieval is largely what is at issue in the problem of the inquiry into ground as Heidegger understands it. The forgetfulness or covering-over of our situatedness, and so of the way in which our existence always involves our being already given over to a world and to a “there,” is something that Heidegger takes as characteristic of traditional philosophical thinking. The first task for philosophy is thus a task of properly orienting or re-orienting itself to the situatedness out of which it arises, or, as Heidegger says in an early lecture on phenomenology, of orienting itself to life:
Phenomenology is the investigation of life in itself. . . . Phenomenology is never closed off, it is always provisional in its absolute immersion in life as such. In it no theories are in dispute, but only genuine insights versus the ungenuine. The genuine ones can be obtained only by an honest and unreserved immersion in life itself in its genuineness, and this is ultimately possible only through the genuineness of a personal life.5
The genuineness that is at stake here cannot be a matter of a particular form of life or a particular mode of living. If that were so, one might expect Heidegger to give us some account of the particularities of that life. No such account is forthcoming, and what thus seems to be at issue in this talk of the “genuineness of a personal life” is just a matter of a certain mode of “comportment”—of the stand one takes in relation to that life. In discussing the idea of the university in 1921-1922, Heidegger begins by asking: “What about this ‘life’ at and in university? Is it the way the university is taken up and experienced? Indeed, the question must be posed concretely: how do we here, now, today, take it; how do we live it? We live it the way we ourselves are, namely in and out of our factical existence [Dasein].”((Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle, p. 57 (GA61:76).) The emphasis is thus on the genuineness of a personal life as personal, that is, as a life that is lived as one’s own. Indeed, if philosophy is to attain any sort of objectivity, then this can only be through the personal involvement that is at issue here. Thus, even when Heidegger emphasizes the character of philosophy as a “theoretical” activity, still he is concerned to emphasize the necessary situatedness even of theoretical insight.
See The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), pp. 74-167 (GA29-30:111-249); “What Is Metaphysics?” trans. David Farrell Krell, in Pathmarks, p. 87 (GA9:110); and Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 2 (GA40:3). ↩
See Being and Time (GA2), H184-191, H341-346; also “What Is Metaphysics?” pp. 88-93 (GA9:111-116). ↩
See “What Is Metaphysics?” pp. 95-96 (GA9:121); and also Basic Questions of Philosophy, trans. Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), pp. 133-156 (GA45:153-180). ↩
“Blik der Sonne, du schönster, der / Dem siebenthorigen Thebe / Seit langem scheint,” cited from Hölderlin’s translation of Sophocles, Antigone, 5.100ff., in Towards the Definition of Philosophy, trans. Ted Sadler (London: The Athlone Press, 2000), p. 63 (GA56/57:74). It is worth noting here the way in which wonder seems to be contrasted with the scientific attitude. In general, Heidegger seems to view wonder as always tied to an experience of the world that he takes to be ontologically more basic than that of scientific inquiry (see, for instance, the discussion of wonder in Basic Questions of Philosophy, pp. 133-156 [GA45:153-180]). ↩
From the lecture course given in the War Emergency Semester (“Kriegsnotsemester”) of 1919, “Die Idee der Philosophie und das Weltanschauungsproblem,” as given in the transcript from Oscar Becker and cited by Kisiel in The Genesis of Heidegger’s “Being and Time,” p. 17; for the German text, see Kisiel, “Das Kriegsnotsemester 1919: Heideggers Durchbruch in die Hermeneutische Phänomenologie,” Philosophisches Jahrbuch 99 (1992), 105-122, esp. pp. 106ff. An excerpt from the firsthand transcript of this lecture by Franz Josef Brecht is included in Towards the Definition of Philosophy, pp. 187-188. ↩