[b]“Heidegger’s Ways of Being”
Andrew Royle
Let us remain with our workman in his workshop, and now imagine that the workman reaches out for a hammer and finds instead an empty space. In now looking for his hammer, the workman starts to notice his workshop, which has been there, surrounding him, all the time. He casts an eye over the shelves, seeing dust; he spies a cracked window; becomes aware of a spider moving across the ceiling; he notices the detritus of uncompleted tasks and worries about deadlines. Heidegger says, in this ‘looking around’, the referential context of Being is ‘lit up’ (p.74). By virtue of the space of the missing hammer it’s as if a light switches on and Dasein sees the world that has been there all along.
The important point is that this light is not switched on ‘out there’ in the world; rather, Dasein switches on a light for him/herself, in the doing, in his/her interaction with the world. Generally, the world is categorized and created for the workman in the context of his particular concerns: he ‘sees’ a missed deadline in a half-finished barrel, or he ‘hears’ his boss’s rebuke through the space of the missing hammer. The empty space becomes a disclosing ground for Dasein to conjure and create the world. In doing this, Heidegger describes Dasein as a ‘ Lumen Naturale’ (a natural light), which lights up its Being-in-the-world “in such a way as to be its [own] there” (p.129).[/b]
This is basically how Dasein seems to be situated out in the world here. A world of things. A world in which things are understood in relationship to each other as either this or that. A hammer, a workshop, a cracked window, a spider.
A workman surrounded by factual entities in a world in which these objective “things”/“relationships” are true for everyone.
But what if, instead, the workman picks up the hammer and uses it to kill someone; and is then able to rationalize/justify it “in his head” as “the right thing to do”?
This is the part where his take on Dasein most intrigues me. The fact of his killing a perceived enemy/threat can be established.*
But how is it established that this behavior is either moral or immoral? That all rational men and women are obligated to construe it as either one or the other?
How does that not revolve around a particular context understood in particular [and often conflicting] ways by particular individuals who have come upon their own moral narrative existentially given the sequence of actual experiences they have come to encompass/embody in a particular life?
If, instead of a workman using a hammer to kill an adversary, it is a soldier using a rifle to kill a Jew – “out in a world” that Heidegger himself inhabited – how are philosophers able to establish either behavior as either necessarily right or necessarily wrong?
In a No God world?
Thus it is my contention that the moral objectivist may well be concerned more with acquiring [subconsciously?] a soothing psychological serenity that comes with believing that this can be accomplished, then in actually demonstrating that his or her own moral narrative does in fact necessarily reflect the optimal point of view.
*Though in a No God world it may never be established.