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Abstract
While it is well known that the early Heidegger distinguishes between different ‘kinds of being’ and identifies various ‘structures’ that compose them, there has been little discussion about what these kinds and structures of being are. This paper defends the ‘Property Thesis’, the position that kinds of being (and their structures) are properties of the entities that have them. I give two arguments for this thesis. The first is grounded in the fact that Heidegger refers to kinds and structures of being as ‘characteristics’ and ‘determinations’, which are just two different words for ‘properties’, in the broadest senses of these terms. The second argument is based on the fact that kinds and structures of being play three roles that properties are supposed to play: they account for similarities between things, they are what predicates express, and they are what abstract nouns refer to.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Robert Audi, Gary Gutting, Kris McDaniel, and Alex Skiles for detailed comments on earlier drafts of this paper. Shorter versions of this paper were presented at the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Northwest Philosophy Conference (2011), the conference ‘A Dangerous Liaison? The Analytic Engagement with Continental Philosophy’ hosted by University of York (2011), a Dissertation Research Seminar at the University of Notre Dame (Fall 2011), and the 2012 Pacific Division Meeting of the American Philosophical Association. Thanks to the audiences and respondents at all of these meetings for helpful comments, questions, and discussion. Thanks also to the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association and the following institutions at the University of Notre Dame for travel funding: the Graduate Student Union, the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts, the Nanovic Institute for European Studies, and the Philosophy Department. Finally, thanks to Rafe McGregor for his hard work in getting this paper published.
Notes
1 Works by Heidegger are cited in the text using the following abbreviations (see References list for complete bibliographic information):
‘Einleitung zu “What ist Metaphysik?”’, in Wegmarken, pp. 365–84. Translations of this work are by Walker Kaufman, ‘Introduction to “What Is Metaphysics?”’, in Pathmarks, pp. 277–90.
Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie.
‘Nachwort zu “What ist Metaphysik?”’, in Wegmarken, pp. 303–12. Translations of this work are by William McNeill, ‘Postscript to “What Is Metaphysics?”’, in Pathmarks, pp. 231–8.
Sein und Zeit. Translations of this work are by Macquarrie and Robinson, Being and Time. Note that I have systematically lowercased the word ‘Being’ and, where appropriate, changed ‘being’ to ‘entity’.
2 ‘Entity’ is my translation of ‘das Seiende’. See §4.1 for a brief discussion of this term.
3 I will often talk about different ‘kinds of being’ when it would be more accurate to talk about ‘being’ of different kinds. What entities literally ‘have’ is being (of some kind or another), not kinds of being. Here is an analogy: we may speak loosely of someone having a certain kind of dog, but what he or she literally ‘has’ is a dog (of some particular kind), not a kind of dog.
4 Given the extensions of these kinds of being, one might wonder if, according to Heidegger, the very same entity can have more than one (specific) kind of being. For a recent discussion of this question, see McDaniel, Citation2013.
5 This raises two questions: First, can anything have the generic kind of being (beingness) but no specific kind of being? Second, is this generic kind of being what Heidegger refers to as ‘being as such’ (Sein überhaupt), the explication of which is the ultimate goal of the (unfinished) project of which Being and Time is but the first part (SZ, pp. 17, 27, 436–7)? These are difficult questions, and I cannot go into them here. For a short discussion of the first of these questions, see §4.1.
6 I take no stand on whether or not the generic kind of being (beingness) has structures.
7 One might object that ‘character of being’ is a better translation of ‘Seinscharaktere’ than ‘characteristic of being’. But, in fact, ‘character’ and ‘characteristic’ are, in this context, synonyms: ‘this ball has the character of being shiny’ means the same thing as ‘this ball has the characteristic of being shiny’. It is worth noting that Macquarrie and Robinson often translate ‘Charakter’ as ‘characteristic’. See, for example, their translations of SZ, pp. 42, 54, 63, 64.
8 My choice of ‘property’ is somewhat arbitrary. If someone objects to my use of this particular word, then I am happy to replace it with any of the following: ‘aspect’, ‘attribute’, ‘characteristic’, ‘determination’, ‘feature’, ‘quality’, or ‘trait’.
9 For example, Eigenschaften, but not structures of being, might be understood as (metaphysical) ‘parts’ of the entities that have them.
10 The claim that structures of being are instantiated does not follow from the fact that structures of being are properties, for there might very well be uninstantiated properties. Rather, it follows from the fact that uninstantiated properties are unlikely to play a central role in an account of anything, including an account of being.
11 This claim is further supported by the fact that Heidegger refers to structures of being as ‘characteristics’ of entities. For example, he refers to existentiality, facticity, and being-fallen as ‘fundamental ontological characteristics’ (fundamentalen ontologischen Charaktere) of Dasein (SZ, p. 191).
12 If Dasein’s being is care, and care is a whole of which existence, facticity, and falling are parts, then where do all of the other structures of Dasein’s being (e.g., state-of-mind, understanding, discourse, etc.) fit in? They are parts of these three top-level structures.
13 More precisely, bundle theorists hold that properties are parts of whatever entities instantiate them, and these entities have no other (metaphysical) parts (e.g., a ‘substratum’ or ‘bare particular’).
14 While material substances provide the easiest illustrations for this view, a bundle theorist need not think that only material substances have metaphysical parts. If there are immaterial souls, for example, then a bundle theorist will understand their properties as (metaphysical) parts of them.
15 There are two worries here. First, one might object that not everyone countenances conjunctive properties or, if one does, believes that they are wholes of which their conjuncts are parts. This is irrelevant, for Heidegger might countenance such properties even if others do not. Second, one might argue that if conjunctive properties are complex properties, then so are disjunctive properties (e.g., being either round or red). Even so, Dasein’s being is better understood as a conjunctive property, for anything which has Dasein’s kind of being also has every structure belonging to that kind of being. This makes sense if Dasein’s being is a conjunctive property but not if it is a disjunctive property.
16 Perhaps these parts cannot ‘exist separately from each other’ only in the sense that each of them cannot be instantiated unless all of the others are co-instantiated along with it.
17 An example of a moment (Moment) is the particular brownness of this particular table; an example of a piece (Stück) is a leg of this table. See Investigation III in Husserl, Citation1901.
18 Øverenget’s thesis, if correct, also helps rebut the objection that Heidegger’s talk of Dasein’s being as a ‘whole’ of which its structure are ‘parts’ is not meant to be taken seriously. If Heidegger is really employing Husserl’s mereological terminology, as Øverenget argues he is, then it stands to reason that his talk of ‘parts’ and ‘wholes’ is meant to be taken literally, not metaphorically. Thanks to Kris McDaniel for drawing this to my attention.
19 It is worth noting that Macquarrie and Robinson translate this sentence as saying that presence-at-hand and readiness-to-hand are ‘attributes’ of entities; ‘attributes’ is just another word for ‘properties’.
20 Detailed discussions of these three reasons can be found in Loux, Citation1978.
21 It is worth noting that (a) Dreyfus (Citation1991, p. xi) refers to being as ‘a fundamental aspect of entities’ (i.e., their intelligibility) (‘aspect’ is just another word for ‘property’), and (b) after denying that intelligibility is a property of things, Dreyfus says that ‘it is relative to Dasein’ (1991, p. 257). Accordingly, one might interpret Dreyfus as denying, not that intelligibility is a property, but that it is a non-relational property.
22 Cf. SZ, pp. 4, 38, 230; GP, pp. 22, 109.
23 A consequence of this view is that the word ‘entity’ is not a maximally general count-noun. For this I have been using the word ‘thing’.
24 One might object that a better canonical translation of ‘all properties are entities’ is ‘∀x (if x is a property → x is en entity)’, which is not a logical truth. This is irrelevant, for I offer this translation only to illustrate a point.
25 See fn. 26 for an explanation of what I mean in saying that Heidegger ‘can’ deny this.
26 In saying that Heidegger ‘can’ reject these reasons, I do not mean that he can do so coherently or even justifiably. What I mean is that doing so does not cause him any additional trouble than he already has in virtue of denying that being is an entity.
27 The word ‘seiende’ is translated as ‘existing’ because there is no verbal adjective of the English verb ‘to be’.
28 See fn. 26 for an explanation of what I mean by ‘can’ in this context.
29 What about Heidegger’s apparent endorsement of the scholastic dictum that being is not a genus (SZ, p. 3)? Doesn’t this suggest that he does not understand being as a property? Well, it might support the view that Heidegger does not understand ‘beingness’, the generic kind of being that applies to everything, as a property. But that is beside the point, for the Property Thesis is limited to specific kinds of being (e.g., care, readiness-to-hand, and presence-at-hand).
30 Moreover, Heidegger says that the characteristics of Dasein’s being are not ‘present-at-hand properties’. If this refers to properties that are present-at-hand (i.e., have presence-at-hand as their kind of being), then Heidegger’s statement is consistent with the claim that the characteristics of Dasein’s being are properties, so long as they are present-at-hand properties.
31 For example, SZ, p. 133. The same is true of passages where Heidegger apparently denies that particular structures of Dasein’s being are properties of Dasein (e.g., SZ, pp. 56–7, 176, 179).
32 Categories, 4a10-11.
33 An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Ch. 23, §§1–2.
34 A Treatise of Human Nature: Book I, Part 1, Section VI.
35 Principles of Philosophy, Part 1, §51.
36 Thanks to Kris McDaniel for raising this objection.
37 See note 6 in van Inwagen (Citation2009b, p. 307).
38 Note that even if this interpretation of Heidegger is correct, it undermines only half of the Property Thesis. It is still true, on this interpretation, that structures of being are properties.
39 ‘The thinking attempted in Being and Time (1927) sets out on the way to prepare an overcoming of metaphysics’ (EWM, p. 368).
40 A similar rejoinder can be given to another objection to my interpretation of Heidegger, namely that I treat him as engaged in an ‘ontic’ rather than ‘ontological’ enterprise: if ‘ontic’ inquiries are concerned with entities and ‘ontological’ ones with being, then, on my interpretation, Heidegger’s enquiry is ontological. This objection assumes that all properties are entities, which, on my view, Heidegger denies.
41 This is true even of analytic philosophers who are nominalists. Analytic philosophers who deny the existence of properties nevertheless generally understand what properties are supposed to be.
42 Of course Heideggerians will insist that this account also concerns the being of these entities. Whether or not this is true is a different issue. We can easily imagine some analytic philosophers agreeing with Heideggerians that entities do indeed have the properties Heidegger ascribes to them while disagreeing that these properties have anything to do with their ‘being’. A position of this sort is suggested by Peter van Inwagen (Citation2009a, p. 475fn.4; Citation2009b, pp. 287–9).
43 Thanks to Kris McDaniel for pressing me on this point.