Apply‑Degger: Reading Being and Time
Following Simon Critchley’s Heidegger Thinking: Being and Time Explained and his eighteen-episode Apply-Degger podcast
“It is my conviction that genuine philosophy can be explained simply and clearly. But it takes the time that it takes. And that can’t be rushed. To be a philosopher is to take one’s time.” Simon Critchley, Preamble to Heidegger Thinking
How this course works
This is a course on Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927) taught deliberately through one interpreter’s eyes: Simon Critchley, who has taught the book continuously since 1989 and whose reading has a definite shape. You will learn Heidegger’s book whole — all of it, both divisions, not the highlights — but you will learn it as Critchley reads it: Being and Time as a book about meaning and finitude rather than mystical “Being”; average everydayness as the place where philosophy begins and ends; anxiety as a calm to be used, not a disorder to be medicated; and, in the closing arc, Critchley’s own turns against Heidegger — the relational character of finitude, originary inauthenticity, the ontology of weakness, and the reckoning with paragraph 74 and 1933. Where the course states a controversial view, it is Critchley’s view, and the tests examine it as such.
The spine of the course is exact: Critchley’s book has eighteen chapters, one per Apply-Degger episode, and this course has eighteen classes, one per chapter. Each class follows the same rhythm:
- Before the hour — listen to the assigned Apply-Degger episode with the matching book chapter open. This is how the material was designed to be used: listeners begged Critchley for a text to follow along with, and the book is that text, rewritten and fully cited. Listen on a walk if you like; Critchley would approve.
- The hour itself — a structured 60 minutes: ten minutes of re-orientation, twenty-five minutes of close re-reading of flagged passages, ten minutes inside Being and Time itself (the concordance below tells you exactly which paragraphs), and a fifteen-minute test.
- The test — ten questions per class: terminology, comprehension, and one application question that asks you to use the concept on your own life, which is the entire point of a podcast called Apply-Degger. Take it closed-book, then check the answer key.
An honest accounting of time. With the episode, each class really asks about two hours of you: an hour of listening with the book open, then the structured hour with its test. That is the full-strength course, and it is the right dosage — Critchley’s first rule is that philosophy “takes the time that it takes.” But if a given week genuinely only has the one hour in it, use the one-hour track: the episode is the class — listen on a walk or a commute (about 45–60 minutes), keep the chapter for reference rather than reading it through, and take the test straight afterward. You lose the close-reading block, not the spine. Save the full two-hour treatment for the classes that grip you — most people find that 8, 11, 14, and 16 demand it.
Class 18 is different: it covers the Coda and then turns to your term paper, with full guidance, topics, a rubric, and a schedule that starts long before class 18 — see the milestones flagged in classes 9 and 14.
Core materials
- Text Simon Critchley, Heidegger Thinking: Being and Time Explained, ed. Ben Olson (New York Review Books, 2026). Page references below are to this edition.
- Audio Apply-Degger, 18 episodes (Onassis Foundation, 2020) — also on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube.
- Primary Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Macquarrie & Robinson (1962) — the translation Critchley uses and quarrels with affectionately. Cited as SZ (German pagination) / BT.
- Deeper Simon Critchley & Reiner Schürmann, On Heidegger’s Being and Time (Routledge, 2008); Critchley’s eight-part Guardian series on Being and Time (2009), mirrored on his Goodreads blog; his Public Seminar interview (2024); the Dasein Foundation Apply-Degger page.
Grading
| Seventeen class tests (best fifteen count) | 55% |
| Term paper (class 18) | 40% |
| Reading journal — one paragraph per class applying one concept to your week | 5% |
The eighteen classes
- 1 Heidegger’s Project in Being and Time
- 2 World
- 3 Space
- 4 Being-with-Others
- 5 Thrown Projection
- 6 Language and Interpretation
- 7 Inauthentic Life
- 8 Anxiety and Care
- 9 Reality
- 10 Truth
- 11 Death
- 12 Conscience
- 13 Anticipatory Resoluteness
- 14 Ecstatic Temporality
- 15 The Time of the Everyday World
- 16 Historicity and Politics
- 17 Existential Time and Vulgar Time
- 18 Coda & Term Paper
01 Heidegger’s Project in Being and Time
The whole course in one sentence: Being is time, and time is finite. What it means to be human is to exist in the stretch between birth and death, and the self becomes what it is only by confronting that finitude — Augustine’s question “Who am I?” asked without God. Critchley’s distinctive opening moves, both to be learned precisely: following Thomas Sheehan, “being” can be a red herring — the book’s real concern is meaning; and against Plato, Heidegger does not want to leave the cave for the sunlight of the forms — he wants to stay in the cave and see the cave differently, because philosophy begins and ends in average everydayness. The enemy throughout is the “cabinet of consciousness”: we are never a mind staring out at an alien world; we are always already outside, alongside things, fascinated — even benumbed (Benommenheit) — by the world we are in.
- Also Critchley’s Guardian series, parts 1 (“Why Heidegger matters”) and 2 (“On ‘mineness’”) — ten-minute warm-ups for this class.
- Watch Hamlet’s “To be, or not to be” (any good production) — Critchley’s emblem for reawakening the taste for perplexity about being.
The hour
| 0:00–0:10 | Re-read the chapter’s subheads in the table of contents; write the one-sentence thesis from memory. Note Critchley’s two framing anecdotes: Fiona Hetherington quoting SZ 62 from memory, and Merriam-Webster’s 2023 word of the year (“authentic” — “we’re currently living in a plague of authenticity”). |
| 0:10–0:35 | Close re-read: the categories/existentials distinction; authenticity as “coming into one’s own” (not accuracy, not moral superiority — and note Adorno’s standing objection); mineness; average everydayness as “not nothing, but a positive phenomenal characteristic” (SZ 43 / BT 69). |
| 0:35–0:45 | Primary text: BT ¶9 (“we are ourselves the entities to be analysed”) and ¶12 on being-in. Watch for how often “proximally and for the most part” appears — and adopt Critchley’s fix: most closely and mostly. |
| 0:45–1:00 | Test 1, closed book. |
Terms to own: Dasein · Jemeinigkeit (mineness) · existentials vs. categories · authenticity / inauthenticity · average everydayness · Geworfenheit · Besorgen (concern) · Benommenheit (fascination) · Destruktion.
Test 1 — ten questions
- State the basic thesis of Being and Time in one sentence, and add the qualification that makes it existential rather than abstract.
- Whom does Critchley follow in treating “being” as a potential red herring, and what does he put in its place?
- Macquarrie & Robinson render zunächst und zumeist as “proximally and for the most part.” What is Critchley’s preferred translation?
- Distinguish categories from existentials, with one example of each.
- Is authenticity a moral achievement for Heidegger? Explain, and name the philosopher whose phrase “the jargon of authenticity” marks the standing objection.
- How does Heidegger’s relation to Plato’s cave differ from Plato’s own?
- What is Benommenheit, and why does Critchley think it is underemphasized in the literature?
- “Knowing is a founded mode.” Founded on what, and arising from what kind of deficiency?
- Which four religious thinkers does Critchley name as influences Heidegger tended to downplay?
- Apply: Describe one activity from your last 24 hours in which you were “outside alongside things,” absorbed and benumbed, with no subject/object split in view. What would it take to describe it without the word “I”?
Answer key
- Being is time — and time is finite: it ends with death, so being human means existing between birth and death and making meaning of that stretch.
- Thomas Sheehan (Making Sense of Heidegger); the real concern is meaning — the meaning of being is inseparable from the significance of being-in-the-world.
- “Most closely and mostly” — his repeated mantra for the book’s default register, average everydayness.
- Categories (ready-to-hand, present-at-hand) apply to entities that are not Dasein — what-questions; existentials (e.g. state-of-mind, understanding, discourse) are a priori structures of Dasein — who-questions.
- No. Authenticity means what is proper to one, “coming into one’s own” (Nietzsche’s “become what you are,” quoted at SZ 145); inauthenticity is not a lower way of being. The objection is Adorno’s.
- Plato’s philosopher exits the cave toward the forms; Heidegger stays in the cave and learns to see it differently — philosophy begins and ends in average everydayness.
- “Fascination” — our benumbed absorption in the world (SZ 61, 76); Critchley says writing on Heidegger neglects it, though it names our default condition (cf. Dreyfus’s “background coping”).
- Founded on being-in-the-world; knowing arises only when lived concern is deficient — when absorbed activity is interrupted — so epistemology is derivative, not primary.
- Paul, Augustine, Luther, Kierkegaard.
- Open answer; strong answers describe skilled absorbed activity (cooking, cycling, playing) where the doing precedes any observing “I,” and notice how description forces nouns onto what was lived as movement.
02 World
Heidegger’s demolition of what Charles Taylor calls the epistemological construal of the world: there is no “problem of perception,” no gap between subject and object to be bridged. The world shows up most closely and mostly as handy — a totality of “stuff” (Critchley’s deliberately plain rendering of das Zeug) organized by in-order-to relations that ultimately point back to us: the for-the-sake-of-which terminates in Dasein. Praxis precedes theory (Heidegger as quasi-pragmatist — the philosopher closest to him in orientation, Critchley says, is William James). The ready-to-hand withdraws in use and announces itself only in breakdown — when the hammer breaks or the laptop dies in the coffee shop — while signs (the farmer’s south wind, the motorcar’s adjustable red arrow) disclose the referential totality without any breakdown at all. The class ends where Critchley ends: with Wallace Stevens’s “The Idea of Order at Key West,” because “she was the single artificer of the world in which she sang” is the thesis that the meaningful world is Dasein-dependent — we are, with Merleau-Ponty, condemned to meaning.
- Poem Wallace Stevens, “The Idea of Order at Key West” (1934) — read it aloud once before the hour.
- Also Guardian series part 3; Charles Taylor, “Overcoming Epistemology” (optional, for the ambitious).
The hour
| 0:00–0:10 | Recap: why is there no problem of perception? Write out the in-order-to chain for one object on your desk until it terminates in a for-the-sake-of-which. |
| 0:10–0:35 | Close re-read: the “stuff” analysis and referential totality; the three modes of breakdown (conspicuous, obtrusive, obstinate, SZ 73–74); Heidegger’s “funny examples” — Critchley reads them as the charm of a 1920s silent movie; involvement (Bewandtnis) and Critchley’s quibble that the translation “actually says nothing.” |
| 0:35–0:45 | Primary text: BT ¶15 on equipment and ¶16 on breakdown; then the Stevens poem again, now as phenomenology. |
| 0:45–1:00 | Test 2. |
Terms to own: Zuhandenheit / Vorhandenheit · das Zeug (“stuff,” pragmata) · referential totality · the in-order-to · das Worumwillen · Bewandtnis · Umsicht (around-seeing) · Umwelt · conspicuous / obtrusive / obstinate.
Test 2 — ten questions
- What is the “epistemological construal” of the world, whose phrase is it, and what is Heidegger’s alternative starting point?
- Why does Critchley prefer “stuff” to “equipment” for das Zeug, and what is the Greek word behind it?
- Why is there never one piece of equipment?
- Name the three characteristics broken equipment takes on, and give Critchley’s contemporary example.
- What philosophical work do signs do that breakdown also does — and what do signs spare us? Give two of Heidegger’s examples.
- Which American philosopher is closest to Heidegger in orientation, per Critchley, and in which doctrine?
- Where does the structure of involvements terminate, and why does that matter?
- What does Critchley find lacking in the translation “involvement” for Bewandtnis, and how does he gloss the term instead?
- What does the Stevens poem contribute that the chapter’s analysis alone does not?
- Apply: Recall the last time a tool failed you mid-task. Describe the “changeover”: what became visible that was invisible seconds before, and what happened to your absorbed activity?
Answer key
- The picture of a worldless subject over against objects, knowing them via representations — Charles Taylor’s phrase. Heidegger starts instead from being-in-the-world: we are always already involved; knowing is founded on that.
- “Equipment” sounds like camping gear; “stuff” keeps the everyday plainness. The Greek is pragmata (SZ 67–68) — things as matters of practical dealing.
- Stuff is essentially relational: each item is what it is within a totality of assignments (pen–ink–paper–desk–lamp–room), a Verweisungsganzheit, referential totality.
- Conspicuous, obtrusive, obstinate (SZ 73–74 / BT 102–4); the laptop screen dying in the coffee shop.
- Signs disclose the ready-to-hand referential totality as a totality — but without breakdown. Examples: the south wind for the farmer, the knot in the handkerchief, the motorcar’s adjustable red arrow (SZ 78–80).
- William James — the late radical empiricism, which abandons consciousness as an entity and static objectivity, and puts practical experience first.
- In Dasein: the for-the-sake-of-which (das Worumwillen). It matters because it makes Dasein the condition of the world’s significance — “we are the worldhood of the world.”
- That it “actually says nothing” — a translation choice with no intuitive content; he glosses Bewandtnis as the situation, the total involvement-context we already inhabit.
- It shows Dasein-dependence lyrically: the singer is “the single artificer of the world in which she sang” — the ordering of brute nature (“meaningless plungings of water and wind”) into a meaningful world is our doing; hence Merleau-Ponty: condemned to meaning.
- Open; strong answers register the shift from transparent use to obtrusive presence-at-hand, the sudden staring, and the re-absorption once repair or workaround restores the flow.
03 Space
Why is the book not called Being and Space? First, the destruction of Descartes: an ontology of the world as sheer extension renders the lived world invisible, and this is no innocent error — it is a “falling into tradition” (medieval substance-ontology taken over unexamined) that still defines the modern world picture. Critchley notes that this destructive side of phenomenology comes close to ideology critique. Then the positive analysis: space is first room and roomliness, not coordinates; the near, the place, the region (better: neighborhood); and Dasein’s own spatiality as Ent-fernung, de-severance — the bringing-close that makes farness vanish. From the radio and the Fernseher (“far-seer”) Critchley extends Heidegger into a theory of social media as a pathological collapsing of distance. Our first measurements are estimations — a stone’s throw, a pipe smoke away — and metrical space is a de-worlding, an impoverishment. The class closes with Pessoa’s Alberto Caeiro: reading Heidegger as “lessons in unlearning” the Cartesian picture, learning to see things as things.
- Poems Pessoa (as Alberto Caeiro), “What we see of things are the things” and “To not think of anything is metaphysics enough.”
- Later Heidegger Skim “Art and Space” (1969) — five pages — for clearing-away (räumen), place, and the sacred.
The hour
| 0:00–0:10 | Recap: why extension “passes over” the world; why adding value-predicates to material nature gets everything backwards. |
| 0:10–0:35 | Close re-read: Ent-fernung and Critchley’s complaint that “de-severance discovers remoteness” (SZ 105) “says pretty much nothing”; the spectacles-on-your-nose example; the radio passage and the social-media extension; the architects polemic (“Like Christopher Nolan movies, Heidegger has a way of making stupid people feel smart. But I didn’t say that”). |
| 0:35–0:45 | Primary text: BT ¶23–24. Then re-read the Marie Kondo aside and Critchley’s counter-claim that “the sacred is best experienced as cluttered.” |
| 0:45–1:00 | Test 3. |
Terms to own: extension / res extensa · Raum as room · nearness · Platz · Gegend (neighborhood) · Ent-fernung (de-severance) · directionality · de-worlding · estimation.
Test 3 — ten questions
- What single concept defines Descartes’s ontology of the world, and what phenomenon does it render invisible?
- Why is Descartes’s error not merely personal, and what does Critchley say this destructive analysis resembles?
- What is wrong with repairing Descartes by adding “value-predicates” to nature?
- What do Raum and Räumlichkeit connote in Critchley’s gloss, and why does it matter phenomenologically?
- Define Ent-fernung and state Critchley’s objection to Macquarrie & Robinson’s rendering of SZ 105.
- Explain the spectacles example: what does it show about nearness?
- What is Heidegger’s point about the radio, and how does Critchley update it? Include his distinction between radio and streaming.
- Give the two estimation-measurements Heidegger cites, and say what they show about primary spatiality.
- What are Pessoa’s “lessons in unlearning” lessons in unlearning, exactly?
- Apply: Take your phone. Describe one way it de-severs (brings close) and one way that de-severing has become, in Critchley’s word, pathological — a collapsing of distance that costs you the near.
Answer key
- Extension (res extensa): the world as mathematically determinable spread-outness, grasped by pure intellection — which passes over the lived, handy, meaningful world entirely.
- It is a “falling into tradition”: Descartes inherits medieval substance-ontology (behind it, Aristotle’s ousia) unexamined, and bequeaths the “world picture” to Kant and modernity. Critchley: destruction here is close to ideology critique.
- It is back to front: we do not first perceive value-free extended things and then paste values on; we inhabit a practical world of significance first, and the scientific conception is founded on it.
- Room and roomliness: we first experience space as the room we are in — inhabited, oriented, furnished — not as three-dimensional coordinate space, which is derivative (a de-worlding).
- De-severance / de-distancing: making farness disappear, bringing close. M&R’s “de-severance discovers remoteness” (for Ent-fernung entdeckt Entferntheit) “says pretty much nothing.”
- The spectacles on my nose are metrically nearest but environmentally more remote than the picture on the wall I see through them (SZ 107): nearness is a matter of concern, not centimeters.
- The radio de-severs the world, expanding the everyday environment (SZ 105). Critchley: radio still has a source and intimacy; streaming has no source and never shuts off; social media is the pathological collapse of distance — everything near, nothing close.
- The lake a stone’s throw away; the farm a pipe smoke away (SZ 105–6). Primary spatial measure is estimation rooted in practice and the body, not metrics (an inch is an Englishman’s thumb).
- Unlearning the Cartesian world picture — the reflex of treating things as extended objects behind appearances — so as to see things as the things they are: “What we see of things are the things.”
- Open; strong answers name a genuine bringing-close (a distant friend’s voice) and a genuine loss (the room you are in, the person opposite you, made far by the feed).
04 Being-with-Others
Who is Dasein, most closely and mostly? Answer: nobody. “Everyone is the other, and no one is himself” (SZ 128). The radical move is not the diagnosis of conformism but the starting point: Dasein begins as being-with (Mitsein) — “Dasein is the with” — so the classical problem of other minds never gets going. The self is not the origin; it is a late precipitate: Critchley’s tide-going-out image, with the self left like a rock on the beach, previews the whole arc of the book (anxiety, death, conscience, resoluteness — and the “very questionable political moment” of ¶74). Learn the care vocabulary precisely (Sorge / Besorgen / Fürsorge) and the two extremes of solicitude — leaping in (dominating) versus leaping ahead (liberating) — with Critchley’s applied example from addiction care and its influence on nursing theory via Patricia Benner. Then the They (das Man — Haugeland’s “the anyone”): distantiality, averageness, leveling down, publicness, “every secret loses its force.” Two counterweights define Critchley’s reading: Sloterdijk’s claim that the They is an encoded social psychology of democratic modernity, and Levinas’s objection that the other exceeds understanding altogether. And take Heidegger at his word: inauthenticity is not bad — authenticity is only an “existentiell modification” of the they-self.
- Watch Terrence Malick, The Thin Red Line (1998), the Witt/Welsh exchange: “You ever get lonely?” — “Only around people.”
- Poems Dickinson, “I’m nobody! Who are you?”; Rimbaud’s letters (“Je est un autre”).
- Also Levinas, “Is Ontology Fundamental?” (1951) — the standing objection, worth ten minutes now, essential by class 11.
The hour
| 0:00–0:10 | Recap: why “Dasein is the with” dissolves rather than solves the problem of intersubjectivity; why even extended-mind theory is unnecessary (the Pixies footnote). |
| 0:10–0:35 | Close re-read: the Sorge/Besorgen/Fürsorge architecture; leaping in vs. leaping ahead (SZ 122); the workshop passage on how others show up; the dictatorship of the They and the subway example; Sloterdijk’s Weimar reading. |
| 0:35–0:45 | Primary text: BT ¶26–27, watching for “being-alone is a deficient mode of being-with” and the leveling-down passage (SZ 127). |
| 0:45–1:00 | Test 4. |
Terms to own: Mitsein · das Man (“the anyone”) · Sorge / Besorgen / Fürsorge · einspringen / vorausspringen · considerateness & forbearance · distantiality · averageness · leveling down · publicness · existentiell modification.
Test 4 — ten questions
- Who is the “who” of everyday Dasein? Quote the sentence from SZ 128 that answers it.
- Why does Critchley reject “one” as an English rendering of das Man, and whose alternative does he adopt?
- Lay out the three-term care vocabulary and the object of each term.
- Distinguish leaping-in from leaping-ahead, and give Critchley’s example of where the distinction has practical force.
- List the moments in the “precipitation of the self” that Critchley previews, in order.
- State Levinas’s objection and name its source essay.
- What is Sloterdijk’s reading of the They, and what uncomfortable conclusion does it reach about democracy?
- What does “every secret loses its force” describe, and what is Critchley’s contemporary example?
- Is being alone a refutation of Mitsein? Explain with the film Critchley cites.
- Apply: Identify one opinion you hold that, on inspection, the anyone holds through you. How would you tell the difference?
Answer key
- The They / the anyone: “Everyone is the other, and no one is himself” (SZ 128 / BT 165–66).
- “One” sounds too posh — “something King Charles might say”; he adopts John Haugeland’s “the anyone.”
- Sorge (care): the being of Dasein itself; Besorgen (concern): our relation to things/stuff; Fürsorge (solicitude, caring-for): our relation to persons.
- Leaping-in dominates: it takes the other’s care away and creates dependency; leaping-ahead frees: it gives the other’s care back to them authentically (SZ 122). Critchley’s example: addiction — forced rehab as ineffective leaping-in; and via Patricia Benner, nursing theory generally.
- Anxiety → being-towards-death → conscience → resoluteness → (the questionable fifth) the community of destiny, the Volk (¶74).
- The relation to the other is not reducible to understanding or comprehension; the other’s alterity commands ethically — “Is Ontology Fundamental?” (1951).
- The They is an encoded critique of the social psychology of modernity — Weimar anomie (Critique of Cynical Reason); the uncomfortable conclusion: what Heidegger describes as the dictatorship of the They just is democratic mass life.
- Publicness: everything already interpreted, pulled close, drained of remoteness and reserve. Critchley’s example: knowing the film from Rotten Tomatoes and Wikipedia before seeing it — extended to social media generally.
- No — “being-alone is a deficient mode of being-with” (SZ 120): aloneness presupposes the with. The Thin Red Line: “You ever get lonely?” “Only around people.”
- Open; strong answers catch an opinion absorbed from ambient consensus and propose a test — can I give its grounds, would I hold it under anxiety, did I ever actually decide it?
05 Thrown Projection
The conceptual infrastructure of the whole book, in one German sentence: Dasein ist geworfener Entwurf — Dasein is thrown projection (SZ 148). We are not cleared by anything else — not God, nature, reason, capital, or power: “it is itself the clearing” (SZ 133). Critchley’s signature here is musical: learning to read Being and Time is learning the rhythm of disclosure and closure, unconcealment and concealment — how to make philosophy funky. Master the three equiprimordial existentials: state-of-mind (Befindlichkeit — Richardson’s “already-having-found-itself-there-ness,” which Critchley calls “absolutely accurate, but incredibly ugly”), understanding as being-able and projection (freedom as an experience, not an idea), and discourse — officially equal, but for Critchley first among equals. Falling is horizontal, not Satanic: we fall at the world, not from grace, and authenticity is only “a modification done in midair” (see the chapter’s merciless satire of the authenticity-day: hot yoga, journaling, then Netflix and a six-pack). Fear is determinate (the giant grizzly bear at the window — “I am food”); anxiety, previewed here, has no object at all. And the anti-metaphysical punchline of Critchley’s whole reading: meaning is not deep. “There is no rabbit. The point is learning to see the hat without wanting the rabbit.”
“Everything — even in Heidegger and even in Being and Time — can be said clearly. Anyone who says otherwise is bullshitting you.”Critchley, ch. 5 — the course’s standard of prose, yours included
- Also Guardian series part 4 (“Thrown into this world”).
- Listen The Doors, “Riders on the Storm” (“into this world we’re thrown”) — Critchley’s anchor for Geworfenheit, quite seriously.
The hour
| 0:00–0:10 | Recap: write the German sentence and translate it; list the three existentials and their fallen mirrors (which arrive in class 7). |
| 0:10–0:35 | Close re-read: the clearing passage (SZ 133); mood as attunement — the guitar-tuning image, reason itself as a mood (SZ 135–36); the grizzly-bear fear analysis and Mitbefindlichkeit (Critchley fearing for his mother); interpretation as laying-out and the fore-structure; the rabbit-and-hat finale. |
| 0:35–0:45 | Primary text: BT ¶29 and ¶31 — watch understanding get defined as ability, Etwas können. |
| 0:45–1:00 | Test 5. |
Terms to own: geworfener Entwurf · Lichtung (clearing) · disclosedness · Befindlichkeit · Stimmung (attunement) · Entwurf (projection — not “having projects”) · potentiality-for-being · Rede · Verfallen · Auslegung & the fore-structure.
Test 5 — ten questions
- Write out the central claim of the chapter in German and English, with its SZ citation.
- “Dasein is itself the clearing.” List three of the candidates Critchley names for what does not do the clearing for us.
- Give Richardson’s translation of Befindlichkeit and Critchley’s two-part verdict on it.
- What does Stimmung connote beyond “mood,” and what surprising item does Heidegger include among moods?
- The three existentials are called equiprimordial. State Critchley’s amendment and his reason.
- How does Heideggerian falling differ from the theological fall? Name the poet whose cosmology it is not.
- Reconstruct the fear analysis with Critchley’s example, then state what distinguishes anxiety.
- What is Mitbefindlichkeit, and what personal example does Critchley give — and against which caricature of Heidegger does it tell?
- “Meaning is not deep.” Explain, ending with the rabbit and the hat.
- Apply: Take this morning’s first mood. Describe it as attunement: what had already been disclosed to you about your day before you had a single thought about it?
Answer key
- Dasein ist geworfener Entwurf — Dasein is thrown projection (SZ 148 / BT 188): thrownness and projection as two aspects of one movement.
- God, nature, reason, capital, power: nothing else clears the there; “it is itself the clearing” (SZ 133 / BT 171).
- “Already-having-found-itself-there-ness” — “absolutely accurate, but incredibly ugly.”
- Attunement, musically: being tuned like an instrument, to oneself and to others; and Heidegger counts reason itself as a mood (SZ 135–36 / BT 175).
- Discourse is first among equals: it is the condition for articulating thrown projection at all — no language, no clearing articulated, no us.
- Falling is horizontal, not vertical: not Milton’s Satan plunging from grace into sin, but absorption — falling at or towards the world; it carries no negative evaluation (SZ 175–76).
- Fear has a determinate object approaching from a region — the eight-foot grizzly at the window (“He’s hungry all right, and I am food”); remove the bear, remove the fear. Anxiety has no object: it reveals the nothing (“What Is Metaphysics?”).
- Co-state-of-mind: fearing-for another as a shared attunement (SZ 142) — his fear for his depressed mother before her death; it tells against the caricature of Heidegger as solipsist.
- Meaning is an existential — the upon-which of intelligibility, done by us on the surface of the world, not a hidden ground behind it. Readers want being to be the rabbit pulled from the hat: “There is no rabbit. The point is learning to see the hat without wanting the rabbit.”
- Open; strong answers treat the mood as world-disclosing (the day already colored heavy, light, threatening, promising) prior to reflection — and note you did not choose it: you found yourself there.
06 Language and Interpretation
The devastating consequence of ¶33: the proposition is not the primary locus of truth. Before any assertion there is the existential-hermeneutical “as” — taking something as something in circumspective dealing (“Too heavy! Hand me the other hammer!”) — and the apophantical “as” of judgment is founded upon it: hermeneutics precedes logic, as the ready-to-hand precedes the present-at-hand. The hermeneutic circle is virtuous, not vicious; the task is to enter it rightly. Critchley stages the whole argument against the Tractatus: where early Wittgenstein consigns everything that matters to silence as “important nonsense,” Heidegger finds meaningful language beneath the proposition, in the workshop, where words are deeds. Discourse (Rede) is the existential-ontological fundament of language (Sprache) — Critchley’s gloss: the deep grammar of existence — and it is ecstatic, outside, with others, never private. Hence the extraordinary phenomenology of hearing and its ethics of silence: “To be able to keep silent, Dasein must have something to say” — complete with Critchley’s fantasy of a reticence bar, his Helsinki anecdote, and Kaurismäki’s films. The class ends by turning Heidegger against himself: if discourse means world-disclosure rather than vocal utterance, then the 1929 doctrine that animals are “poor in world” collapses — enter the octopus, which “is indeed the worldhood of its world.”
- Watch Aki Kaurismäki, Fallen Leaves (2023) or The Man Without a Past (2002) — reticence and dry, dark humor as a form of life.
- Also Peter Godfrey-Smith, Other Minds (2016), ch. 1 — for the octopus excursus.
The hour
| 0:00–0:10 | Recap: the two “as” structures, with the penguin examples; why the circle is virtuous. |
| 0:10–0:35 | Close re-read: the Tractatus set-piece (seven propositions; the von Ficker letter; “important nonsense”); Rede vs. Sprache; the voice of the friend (SZ 163) with Critchley’s Harvey joke and its melancholy (“Dasein is its own best friend, which is a slightly sad state of affairs”); hearing things, never noises; reticence. |
| 0:35–0:45 | Primary text: BT ¶33’s workshop passage (SZ 157) and ¶34 on hearing and keeping silent (SZ 163–65). |
| 0:45–1:00 | Test 6. |
Terms to own: hermeneutic circle · existential-hermeneutical “as” / apophantical “as” · assertion · Rede / Sprache · Mitteilung · hearkening · reticence (Verschwiegenheit) · zoon logon echon re-translated · world-poverty (and its octopus problem).
Test 6 — ten questions
- Why is the hermeneutic circle virtuous rather than vicious, and what is the actual task it sets us?
- State the devastating consequence of ¶33 and its architectural parallel earlier in the book.
- Distinguish the two “as” structures with one workshop example and one penguin example.
- Which text of Aristotle’s is ¶33 “more or less cribbed from”?
- Reconstruct Critchley’s Wittgenstein contrast: what is “important nonsense,” and what does Heidegger find that the Tractatus cannot?
- Define the Rede/Sprache distinction and give Critchley’s gloss on Rede.
- What does it mean that language is “ecstatic,” and which later philosopher’s private-language argument does Critchley align with it?
- What do we hear first, per SZ 163 — give two examples — and what makes Critchley call some of Heidegger’s examples “slightly suspicious”?
- What is the condition of authentic silence, and what real-world institutions does Critchley imagine or recommend for it?
- Apply: Attempt one hour of Heideggerian reticence today: speak only when you have something to say. Report what idle talk you swallowed, and what, if anything, became audible.
Answer key
- Because interpretation lays out what understanding already has — we always move within prior understanding (fore-having, fore-sight, fore-conception); the task is not to escape the circle but to enter it in the right way (SZ 152–53).
- The assertion is not the primary locus of truth: judgments are founded on pre-propositional interpretation, so hermeneutics precedes logic and epistemology — exactly as the ready-to-hand precedes the present-at-hand.
- Hermeneutical “as”: “Too heavy! Hand me the other hammer!” (SZ 157) — words as actions inside concern. Apophantical “as”: “All penguins are birds” (logically assessable) or “There is a penguin on the table” (empirically false).
- De Interpretatione (Peri Hermeneias).
- For early Wittgenstein propositions exhaust the sayable; what matters most — ethics, aesthetics, religion — is unsayable “important nonsense” (the letter to von Ficker: what matters is what is not said). Heidegger locates meaningful language prior to the proposition, so what matters can be said — in the mode of doing.
- Sprache is the totality of words; Rede is its existential-ontological fundament, the articulation of intelligibility — Critchley: a deep or transcendental grammar of existence, intersubjective through and through.
- Language is not in the head: as being-in-the-world, Dasein is already outside when it understands (SZ 162); word structure is world structure — aligned with the later Wittgenstein’s argument against private language.
- We hear things, never bare noises: the creaking wagon, the motorcycle, the north wind, the woodpecker, the column on the march (SZ 163) — that last one, with its military ring, is what Critchley flags given Heidegger’s later politics.
- “To be able to keep silent, Dasein must have something to say” (SZ 165). Critchley’s reticence bar (the Helsinki fantasy); his real recommendation, Burp Castle in the East Village; Kaurismäki’s films as the cinema of it.
- Open; graded on honesty of observation, not success.
07 Inauthentic Life
Back to everyday life: the three existentials get their fallen mirrors — idle talk (with its written form, scribbling: for Critchley, tabloids, blogging, updating), curiosity (Neugier: a greed for the new, Augustine’s eye-lust, not wonder), and ambiguity (everyone acquainted with everything, understanding nothing, secretly being-against-one-another). Two Critchley signatures here. First, suspicion: Heidegger insists this is not a critique of culture — “the lady doth protest too much” — of course it is, of his culture and ours (scrolling, news-flash existence, “Plandemic” ambiguity weaponized to divide). Second, attention to what the scholarship skips: the five characteristics of falling’s movement — tempting, tranquilizing, alienating, entangling, turbulent — which Critchley reads as the very structure of thrownness, with detours through Nietzsche’s “European Buddhism” (tranquilization by cultural exoticism) and Philip Rieff’s triumph of the therapeutic (entanglement in self-dissection). Keep the thesis that governs Critchley’s whole reading: falling is not a fall from grace and not a “night view” of Dasein — it is daytime, “like daytime TV, aggressively banal” — and the hinge question at the chapter’s end: if authenticity is only a modified grasp of everydayness, how would that modification feel? (Answer, next class: anxiety.)
- Read Ibsen, Hedda Gabler, act 1 — the craving for “liveliness” as curiosity’s emblem.
- Also Michael Friedman, A Parting of the Ways (on the 1929 Davos encounter with Cassirer) — optional background for the chapter’s Kultur aside.
The hour
| 0:00–0:10 | Recap: map each fallen concept to its existential; recall the etymology of Neugier and Augustine’s Augenlust. |
| 0:10–0:35 | Close re-read: curiosity as “not tarrying alongside what is closest” (SZ 172); ambiguity’s politics; then the five characteristics of falling, one by one, with Critchley’s cultural glosses (Nietzsche, Rieff, Freud’s “we’re bringing them the plague”). |
| 0:35–0:45 | Primary text: BT ¶38, watching for “this term does not express any negative evaluation” and “Dasein exists factically” (SZ 179) — the phrase’s first appearance. |
| 0:45–1:00 | Test 7. |
Terms to own: Gerede (idle talk) · scribbling · Neugier · Augenlust · thaumazein (what curiosity is not) · Zweideutigkeit · the five characteristics of falling · “night view.”
Test 7 — ten questions
- Match each fallen mirror concept to its existential.
- Unpack the German etymology of Neugier and its consequence for how curiosity relates to novelty.
- Which two ancient authors anchor ¶36 on curiosity, and with which ideas?
- Why is curiosity not thaumazein?
- List the five characteristics of the movement of falling, and state Critchley’s claim about their status in the literature.
- How does Critchley gloss “alienation” via Nietzsche, and “entanglement” via Rieff?
- What is Critchley’s “the lady doth protest too much” suspicion, and what contemporary phenomena does he map the concepts onto?
- What does Hedda Gabler illustrate, and what is the joke Critchley attaches to it?
- State the chapter-ending relation between authenticity and everydayness, quoting SZ 179.
- Apply: Audit yesterday’s screen time against the three concepts: one instance each of idle talk, curiosity, and ambiguity. Which of the five characteristics of falling best names what kept you there?
Answer key
- Idle talk ↔ discourse; curiosity ↔ understanding; ambiguity ↔ state-of-mind.
- Gier (greed/lust) for the Neu (new): curiosity is a greed for novelty that seizes the new only to leap to the next new — distraction, never dwelling.
- Aristotle (the Metaphysics opening: all men desire to know, the delight in sight) and Augustine (Confessions 10: concupiscence, the lust of the eyes — Heidegger’s Augenlust).
- Wonder tarries before what it cannot explain; curiosity is a specific way of not tarrying alongside what is closest (SZ 172) — everywhere and nowhere.
- Tempting, tranquilizing, alienating, entangling, turbulent — making up the structure of thrownness; Critchley says they are barely discussed in the scholarship.
- Alienation as Nietzsche’s “European Buddhism”: passive-nihilist self-tranquilization through exoticized foreign cultures. Entanglement as Rieff’s triumph of the therapeutic: self-dissection, hierarchies of trauma, the culture of therapy.
- That Heidegger’s insistence that this is not a moralizing “philosophy of culture” is unconvincing — it plainly is cultural critique; Critchley maps it onto scrolling, updating, news-flash culture, and the weaponized ambiguity of conspiracy discourse (“Plandemic,” “The Great Reset”).
- The craving for “liveliness” — the supposedly genuinely lively life that curiosity and idle talk promise (SZ 173); the joke: “Welcome to Norway! In my experience, women in Norway always know where the gun is.”
- “Authentic existence is not something which floats above falling everydayness; existentially, it is only a modified way in which such everydayness is seized upon” (SZ 179 / BT 224).
- Open; strong answers are specific and unflattering, and correctly deploy one of the five characteristics (most often tranquilization or turbulence — “groundless floating”).
08 Anxiety and Care
The culmination of Division 1, and the emotional center of Critchley’s whole project. Two questions: how is the whole of being-in-the-world disclosed (anxiety) and how is it defined (care), with the Cura fable as pre-ontological confirmation — Saturn, who is time, arbitrates: Care possesses the human as long as it lives. Learn the care structure the way Critchley teaches it — “twelve steps, a bit like Alcoholics Anonymous” — down to the formula articulated thrown projection and his images for it: the hinge, the articulated lorry, the Brooklyn Bridge (“maybe thrownness is Brooklyn and projection is Manhattan”). The meaning of care is temporality, and primordial time is finite — no eternity anywhere in this book. Then anxiety, in Critchley’s aquatic key: the tide of the They goes out and the self precipitates, stranded “on the great beach of being.” Anxiety is objectless, rare, a calm — not a disorder but an order, something to be used, not medicated away (Pacino in Heat: “I preserve it because I need it. It keeps me sharp”). And the class contains the book’s most personal page: Critchley’s 1982 breakdown at Essex, reading “What Is Metaphysics?” in an East London council flat with Echo and the Bunnymen on — his testimony that “philosophy’s goal is not happiness; anxiety is the motor, the drive of philosophy.” The chapter ends with the claim that frames the rest of the course: Being and Time marries Aristotle and Christian anthropology — Paul, Augustine, Luther, Kierkegaard — inside a resolute atheism.
“Philosophy’s goal is not happiness; anxiety is the motor, the drive of philosophy.”Critchley, ch. 8 — on why he does philosophy at all
- Read Heidegger, “What Is Metaphysics?” (1929) — the anxiety lecture; short, and the text that saved Critchley’s twenty-two-year-old self.
- Watch The Thin Red Line again, now for Witt’s death: anxiety as courage, “shrinking back from shrinking back.”
- Also Camus, The Stranger, final pages (“the tender indifference of the world”); Guardian series part 5.
The hour
| 0:00–0:10 | Recap: write the full care formula (ahead-of-itself–already-in–alongside) and assign each element to existentiality, facticity, falling. |
| 0:10–0:35 | Close re-read: the “understanding state-of-mind” paradox; the world as “nothing and nowhere,” unheimlich, solus ipse (SZ 188); party-being (first wave vs. acid-house second wave); the personal revelation pages; the Cura fable. |
| 0:35–0:45 | Primary text: BT ¶40 (SZ 184–91). Read it slowly; this is the hinge of the book. |
| 0:45–1:00 | Test 8. |
Terms to own: Angst · Grundstimmung · Ruhe (anxiety as calm) · unheimlich · solus ipse · care (Sorge) & its three elements · articulated thrown projection · Zeitlichkeit · Endlichkeit · the Cura fable.
Test 8 — ten questions
- State the twofold question of Division 1’s chapter 6 and where each part is answered.
- Why is “understanding state-of-mind” a deliberate paradox?
- Whose rendering “articulated thrown projection” does Critchley adopt, and which three images does he use to teach it?
- Complete the chain: the meaning of care is ___; and the decisive property of that meaning is ___. What theological consequence follows?
- Distinguish fear from anxiety using Critchley’s menagerie, ending with his punchline about what “I” turn out to be.
- Describe Critchley’s aquatic model of the self’s first appearance.
- What is anxiety medically not, for Critchley, and what is it instead? Cite his film witness.
- Retell the Cura fable: who gives what, who arbitrates, and what does the etymology of homo confirm?
- Which two traditions does SZ 199’s footnote fuse, and what does Critchley call the resulting position?
- Apply: Critchley says anxiety is rare, calm, and revelatory — a “conversion experience,” not everyday worry. Describe one experience of yours that qualifies (or explain, precisely, why none does). What did the world look like from inside it?
Answer key
- How is the whole of being-in-the-world disclosed (¶40: anxiety) and how is it defined (¶41: care); ¶42 adds pre-ontological confirmation via the Cura fable.
- It welds the two distinct existentials — understanding (projection) and state-of-mind (thrownness) — into one: anxiety is the mood that discloses the whole structure at once.
- Otto Pöggeler’s; the hinge, the articulated lorry, and the Brooklyn Bridge as a span between the banks of thrownness and projection.
- Temporality; finitude — “primordial time is finite” (SZ 331). Consequence: no eternal being anywhere in Heidegger; any theology of eternity is a nonstarter.
- Fear is of an entity — the bear, the badger “threatening me with its badgeriness”; anxiety has no entity: it is anxious in the face of being-in-the-world as such. “I am the rabbit. I am the badger. Sort of.”
- The self precipitates: the tide of the They’s warm brine goes out in anxiety and the self is left like a rock on the great beach of being — individuated, but still a “modified inauthenticity” that the tide will re-cover.
- Not a DSM disorder to be medicated out of existence; an order — ontological, rare (selten), a calm (Ruhe) to be put to work. Pacino in Heat: “I’ve got to hold on to my angst… It keeps me sharp.”
- Care shapes the creature from humus; Jupiter gives spirit, Earth the body, each reclaiming its gift at death; Saturn — time — arbitrates: Care possesses the human as long as it lives. Homo from humus: we are earth, and care’s meaning is time.
- Aristotle’s ontology and Christian anthropology (Paul, Augustine, Luther, Kierkegaard); the fusion is “neither Aristotelian nor Christian but resolutely atheist.”
- Open; graded on the fear/anxiety distinction being correctly applied — no object, world gone “nothing and nowhere,” strange calm — not on having had the experience.
09 Reality
Critchley builds his own pedagogical grid of four theses on mind and world — empirical idealism (Berkeley), transcendental realism (Plato to Meillassoux), empirical realism (Dr. Johnson kicking the stone), transcendental idealism (Kant) — in order to show that Heidegger rejects the question itself: asking for proof of the external world is the wrong question, posed by a “proximally worldless” subject that has never existed. The scandal of philosophy is not that the proof is missing but that proofs keep being attempted; Dasein “defies such proofs, because, in its Being, it already is.” Kant gets closest and still fails twice over (the residual “I think,” and representations — both present-at-hand). Critchley’s interpretive hunch, examinable as such: fundamental ontology is an existential deepening of transcendental idealism. Most audaciously, epistemology itself is diagnosed as a symptom of falling. And then the wrinkle Critchley will not let Heidegger smooth over: “Reality (not the Real) is dependent upon care” (SZ 212) — the Dasein-independent Real (matter, nature, earth) re-enters, threatening the very dualism, the split phenomenon, that Heidegger forbade. Watch this wrinkle: it resurfaces as earth in the artwork essay and in the late fourfold.
- Also Boswell’s Life of Johnson on the stone-kick (“I refute it thus”); Critchley’s polemical rule: “Never trust a movement that begins with word ‘New.’”
- Term paper Read the topic list in class 18 today. Choose provisionally; you will read the second half of the course differently once you have.
The hour
| 0:00–0:10 | Recap: draw the 2×2 of the four theses with a representative in each cell. |
| 0:10–0:35 | Close re-read: the scandal-of-philosophy inversion; the two Kantian presuppositions; epistemology as fallen; the reality/Real distinction and Critchley’s question whether it splits the phenomenon. |
| 0:35–0:45 | Primary text: BT ¶43(a), SZ 202–8 — find the “Aristotle was no less an idealist than Kant” joke in the wild. |
| 0:45–1:00 | Test 9. |
Terms to own: esse est percipi · transcendental realism / idealism · the “scandal of philosophy” inverted · “proximally worldless” · Vorstellungen · Realität vs. das Reale · the founded mode · earth & the fourfold (forward references).
Test 9 — ten questions
- Name the four theses of Critchley’s grid with one representative each.
- Why, for Kant, does empirical realism require transcendental idealism?
- State Heidegger’s two objections to Kant’s subject.
- How does Heidegger invert Kant’s “scandal of philosophy,” and what does Dasein do to such proofs?
- What must both the prover and the believer of the external world presuppose, and why is it false?
- What is the “astonishing claim” about epistemology’s origin?
- In what sense is being-in-the-world compatible with both realism and idealism — and why are both nonetheless wrong?
- Quote or paraphrase SZ 212 on reality and the Real, and state Critchley’s worry about it.
- Where does the Real resurface in later Heidegger, per Critchley?
- Apply: Critchley calls fundamental ontology an “existential deepening of transcendental idealism.” In three sentences, defend or attack this hunch using one concept from classes 1–8.
Answer key
- Empirical idealism — Berkeley; transcendental realism — Plato/Descartes (revival: Meillassoux); empirical realism — Samuel Johnson; transcendental idealism — Kant.
- Because the felt reality of objects is articulated by the subject’s categories: objects are empirically real precisely as appearances constituted transcendentally — realism about experience rides on idealism about its conditions.
- (1) The “I think” is a residue of Descartes’s res cogitans — a cogito without an ergo sum, still an isolated subject; (2) the relation to the world is modeled as representation (Vorstellungen) — both trapped in the ontology of the present-at-hand, missing the ready-to-hand world.
- The scandal is not that the proof of the external world is missing but that proofs keep being expected and attempted; “Dasein defies such proofs, because, in its Being, it already is” (SZ 205 / BT 249).
- A “proximally worldless” subject — Critchley: “Homeless. Without shelter” — which then needs the world restored by proof or by faith; false because Dasein is never worldless in the first place.
- That epistemology — burying the external world in nullity and then demanding its proof — is a symptom and consequence of Dasein’s falling (SZ 206 / BT 250).
- With realism: entities really are there, not ideas in the head; with idealism: the understanding of being is the condition for anything showing up — hence the joke “Aristotle was no less an idealist than Kant.” Both are wrong because both presuppose the worldless subject and present-at-hand ontology.
- “Being (not entities) is dependent upon the understanding of Being; that is to say, Reality (not the Real) is dependent upon care” (SZ 212 / BT 255). Critchley’s worry: the ad hoc reality/Real dualism may “split the phenomenon” — the one thing Heidegger swore never to do.
- As earth in “The Origin of the Work of Art” and in the fourfold (earth, sky, mortals, divinities); Critchley also links it to matter, nature, and Gaia.
- Open; strong answers connect the Copernican inheritance to an existential structure (e.g., the for-the-sake-of-which, or worldhood as existential) or attack via the Real’s independence.
10 Truth
¶44 opens with what Critchley calls one of Heidegger’s “reefer moments” — a wild genealogy that runs the correspondence theory of truth back through Aquinas’s adaequatio (via Avicenna, via Isaac Israeli) to Aristotle and Parmenides. The deconstruction proceeds in three steps, and Critchley makes it the methodological template Derrida inherited: the quasi-transcendental — conditions of possibility that are simultaneously conditions of impossibility — and deconstruction as genealogical reactivation, not critique. The core result, via the picture-hanging-askew example: truth is being-uncovering; behind the proposition stands alêtheia, unconcealment, rooted in lêthê, oblivion — truth as a kinetic, bivalent movement that mirrors thrown projection. Hence: Dasein is in the truth and in untruth; truth is relative to Dasein; Newton’s laws became true through their discovery; there are no eternal truths; and skepticism is not refuted but rendered unintelligible — with Critchley’s mild dissent duly noted (“What is philosophy without the perpetual return of skepticism?”). The applied payoff is Havel and Patočka: living in the truth under a regime of lies — not speaking truth to power, but being-in-the-truth as power. And note Critchley’s honesty about his author: Heidegger’s perpetual “we have not yet begun” throat-clearing “risks being dishonest” — a thread he picks up in class 18.
- Read Václav Havel, “The Power of the Powerless” (1978), §§1–7 — the greengrocer.
- Also Heidegger, “On the Essence of Truth” (1930) — for ek-sistence and errance.
The hour
| 0:00–0:10 | Recap: reconstruct the genealogy of correspondence from memory, then check it. |
| 0:10–0:35 | Close re-read: the askew-picture demonstration; “preserve the force of the most elemental words” vs. word-mysticism (the “Grand Hotel Abyss” jibe); the two paths of Parmenides; Newton’s laws; the suicide argument and Critchley’s reservation. |
| 0:35–0:45 | Primary text: BT ¶44(b), SZ 217–23. |
| 0:45–1:00 | Test 10. |
Terms to own: correspondence / adaequatio · alêtheia / lêthê · Entdeckend-sein (being-uncovering) · the quasi-transcendental · krinein · ek-sistence · errance · “no eternal truths.”
Test 10 — ten questions
- Trace the genealogy of the correspondence theory through its five stations.
- What does the askew-picture example demonstrate about assertion?
- Unpack alêtheia etymologically and state what kind of “thing” truth becomes on this account.
- How do “in the truth” and “in untruth” map onto the care structure?
- What exactly does Heidegger claim about Newton’s laws, and what general thesis does it exemplify?
- Reconstruct the anti-skeptical argument, including the suicide point — then give Critchley’s reservation.
- What is the quasi-transcendental, who inherits it, and how does deconstruction differ from critique on this account?
- Who “lived in the truth” politically, via whom, and how does Critchley distinguish this from “speaking truth to power”?
- With which two open questions does Division 1 close, and where do they lead?
- Apply: Take a truth you hold that was “discovered” in your lifetime. In what sense was it not true before its discovery — and in what sense does that claim not mean “anything goes”?
Answer key
- Proposition–fact correspondence ← scholastic adaequatio intellectus et rei (Aquinas) ← Avicenna ← Isaac Israeli’s Book of Definitions ← Aristotle’s likeness of soul and things ← Parmenides’ sameness of thinking and being.
- That assertion is not a matching of inner representation to outer object: when I turn and see the askew picture, what is demonstrated is the being-uncovered of the thing itself — assertion uncovers (SZ 217).
- A-lêtheia: privative of lêthê (forgetting, oblivion, sleep): truth is un-concealment — not a static property of sentences but a kinetic, bivalent movement between concealment and unconcealment, mirroring thrown projection.
- In the truth through projection/disclosure; in untruth through falling (idle talk, curiosity, ambiguity cover over); both at once, since Dasein is thrown projection — Parmenides’ two paths.
- They were not true before Newton and became true through their discovery: truth is relative to Dasein’s disclosedness; “there is truth only insofar as Dasein is” (SZ 226); hence no eternal truths.
- Skepticism needs a skeptic; an actual skeptic — someone existing in the denial of truth — has never existed, since existing presupposes disclosedness; consistent denial would be self-obliteration, which proves nothing. Critchley: “I am not entirely convinced. What is philosophy without the perpetual return of skepticism?”
- Conditions of possibility that are simultaneously conditions of impossibility, unearthed by genealogical reactivation of sedimented concepts; Derrida inherits it; unlike Kantian critique it requires no prior normative standpoint.
- Havel, via Jan Patočka (Husserl’s student): authenticity as living in the truth within a world based on a lie. Not addressing power from outside but assuming one’s dormant potency: “living in the truth is power.”
- Authenticity (is care primordial enough?) and totality (is Dasein grasped as a whole?) — leading to Division 2: death and conscience.
- Open; strong answers keep Dasein-relativity distinct from arbitrary relativism: uncovering is answerable to the entities uncovered.
11 Death
Recorded in lockdown, April 2020, “from the city of death that New York has become” — “if ever there were a moment to become an existential phenomenologist, then it is now.” This is the longest class and the one where Critchley’s own philosophy shows itself most fully. First, full-metal Heidegger: death as “the possibility of the absolute impossibility of Dasein,” with its four criteria — ownmost, nonrelational, not to be outstripped, certain-and-indefinite; the They’s tranquilization (“one dies”; Duchamp’s epitaph; “prayers and thoughts”); and the pivotal distinction between expecting death (still clinging to the actual) and anticipating it — running ahead into possibility, culminating in “an impassioned freedom towards death.” Possibility stands higher than actuality: the anti-Hegelian axiom of the whole book. Then the counterattack, which is Critchley’s signature contribution: with Levinas’s 1987 “Dying for…” lecture, he targets nonrelationality. Death first enters the world through the other’s dying and my grief (Antigone before Polynices); Heidegger demotes mourning, reduces dying-for-another to sacrifice, and turns the dead beloved into a present-at-hand corpse. Against this: the relational character of finitude, death as the impossibility of possibility (Levinas/Blanchot), “the only authentic death is inauthentic,” and the program Critchley calls the ontology of weakness — making space in Heidegger for vulnerability, dependency, and illness. Learn both positions well enough to argue either.
“The only authentic death is inauthentic.”Critchley’s counter-thesis to Heidegger — the hinge of the ontology of weakness
- Read Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich — Heidegger’s own footnoted example of “how others die.”
- Also Critchley’s pandemic essay “To Philosophize Is to Learn How to Die” (New York Times, April 2020) — the Montaigne line the chapter also invokes; Guardian series part 6 (“Death”).
The hour
| 0:00–0:10 | Recap: the two leftover problems (totality, authenticity) and their assignments (death, conscience); the Sterben/perishing/demise triad and Critchley’s three objections to it. |
| 0:10–0:35 | Close re-read: the four criteria; anticipation vs. expectation; the violent vocabulary (shattering, wrenching); then the Levinas pages — the 1987 context, sich opfern and its terrible echo, mourning made secondary — and Critchley’s counter-thesis in full. |
| 0:35–0:45 | Primary text: BT ¶¶50–53 (SZ 249–67). Read ¶53 aloud if you can bear it; the prose is the argument. |
| 0:45–1:00 | Test 11. |
Terms to own: being-towards-death · the four criteria · Vorlaufen / Erwarten · man stirbt · Sterben / perishing / demise · Endlichkeit · relational finitude · impossibility of possibility · ontology of weakness.
Test 11 — ten questions
- State the four criteria of the full existential conception of death (SZ 258–59).
- Distinguish anticipation from expectation, and explain “the possibilization of the possible.”
- What is the anti-Hegelian axiom about modality, and why does death exemplify it supremely?
- Give three of the They’s tranquilization strategies, with Critchley’s examples.
- Set out the Sterben / perishing / demise triad and Critchley’s three objections to it.
- Which criterion does Critchley attack, with what counter-thesis, and on what phenomenological ground?
- Reconstruct the Levinas “Dying for…” episode: date, context, and the reading of sich opfern.
- How do Levinas and Blanchot invert Heidegger’s formula for death, and what does the inversion do to “virile” authenticity?
- What compositional fact (via Sheehan) does Critchley use to explain Division 2’s instability, and which textual “spin-around” does it explain?
- Apply: Write two short paragraphs on a death that has touched your life: first in strict Heideggerian terms (ownmost, nonrelational possibility), then in Critchley’s terms (relational finitude, grief as access). Which description is truer to the phenomenon — and what does your answer commit you to?
Answer key
- Ownmost, nonrelational, not to be outstripped, certain and as such indefinite.
- Expectation relates to death as a future actuality (when? how? circumstances) and so “retains too much of the actual”; anticipation (Vorlaufen, running-ahead) relates to death purely as possibility, intensifying it without actualizing it — making the possible more possible.
- Possibility stands higher than actuality (against Hegel’s primacy of Wirklichkeit); death is pure, unsurpassable possibility — never an actuality for me — hence the book is “a long hymn of praise to possibility.”
- “One dies” (man stirbt) — death always someone else’s; Duchamp’s epitaph “Besides, it’s always other people who die”; the dying of others as “a social inconvenience”; “prayers and thoughts” after shootings — shocked by death, never bothered by it.
- Dying (Dasein) / perishing (plants, animals) / demise (the in-between phenomenon). Objections: animals may not merely perish (the octopus again); humans demonstrably can perish (Kafka’s “like a dog,” war, famine); and persons in a permanent vegetative state would cease to count as Dasein — “a big problem.”
- Nonrelationality. Counter-thesis: the relational character of finitude — death first enters the world through the other’s dying and through grief (Antigone before Polynices); mourning is not secondary but disclosive; hence “the only authentic death is inauthentic.”
- March 1987, Collège International de Philosophie, at the height of the Heidegger affair (Farías). Rather than debate Heidegger’s Nazism, Levinas reads SZ 240 on dying-for as mere sacrifice (sich opfern) and lets the older word for sacrifice — holocaustos — resonate: the other’s death made secondary on the altar of mineness.
- Heidegger: death is the possibility of impossibility; Levinas/Blanchot: the impossibility of possibility — that over which I have no power, which impotentializes the self and disables the “healthy virility” of authentic being-towards-death.
- Division 2 was drafted in six to eight weeks for the Marburg chair; hence at SZ 259 inauthenticity is suddenly “based on” authenticity — inverting Division 1’s claim that authenticity is a modification of inauthenticity.
- Open; graded on both descriptions being accurate before the verdict is given.
12 Conscience
Critchley teaches this chapter twice, borrowing Leo Strauss’s distinction. The exoteric ten minutes: being-towards-death needs ontic attestation; conscience is a call that pulls us out of the hubbub; it says nothing — like Cordelia’s “Nothing, my lord” — except one word, Guilty!; guilt means ontological lack and debt (“I owe therefore I am”; a mortgage is a death-pledge), the pre-moral source of any morality; the caller is not God but Dasein itself (“Me Myself and I”) — though the structure remains “powerfully Lutheran”: a Lutheran atheism. What we choose is not conscience but wanting to have a conscience, and that choice is resoluteness. The esoteric version is where “the ice floe of Being and Time breaks up”: the call comes from me yet from beyond me and over me — the stranger voice; and Dasein is “the null basis-being of a nullity” — a double nullity, powerless over its thrown basis, lagging behind its possibilities, choosing one possibility only by not choosing the others. This grounds Critchley’s anti-heroic Heidegger — not the teenage-ninja-Nietzsche of self-mastery but a Beckettian Nietzschean (“From where did I get this excess of vigor? From my weakness, perhaps”; Maria Bamford: “Weakness is the brand”). The chapter closes with resoluteness as reticent, anxiety-ready stillness (soundtrack: Stars of the Lid), and the fertile concept of the Situation — unfolded four ways: Aristotle’s phronesis, Dreyfus’s expertise, Badiou’s event and Sartre’s fused group, and Debord’s Situationism — with the teasing note that “activity” embraces even “the passivity of resistance”: Bartleby.
- Read Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, second essay — the subtext of Heidegger’s phenomenology of guilt; Guardian series part 7 (“Conscience”).
- Listen The Fall, “Repetition” (“please listen to The Fall’s ‘Repetition’; it will help you live your life”); Stars of the Lid, any album, during the re-reading.
The hour
| 0:00–0:10 | Recap: the exoteric version in your own ten sentences. |
| 0:10–0:35 | Close re-read: the call’s phenomenology (silent, from afar unto afar, cold assurance); “the call comes from me and yet from beyond me and over me” (SZ 275); the double-nullity argument step by step; the Beckett and Bamford pages; resoluteness and the Situation’s four unpackings. |
| 0:35–0:45 | Primary text: BT ¶¶56–58 (SZ 273–89). Note where Macquarrie & Robinson add quotation marks around “nothing” that the German does not have — “the nothing is naked.” |
| 0:45–1:00 | Test 12. |
Terms to own: Ruf · Gewissen · Schuld (guilt/debt) · Gewissen-haben-wollen · the double nullity · die fremde Stimme · Entschlossenheit · the Situation · Wiederholung (“fetching back”) · answerability.
Test 12 — ten questions
- What structural job does conscience perform after the death analysis?
- What does the call say, and which Shakespearean figure is Critchley’s emblem for it — against which other?
- Who calls? State the paradox with the German sentence from SZ 275.
- Unpack the ontological meaning of Schuld, including the economic register, and its relation to morality.
- Explain “the null basis-being of a nullity”: what are the two nullities?
- What is chosen in becoming authentic — and what is emphatically not chosen?
- Define resoluteness per SZ 296–97 and describe its acoustics in Critchley’s telling.
- What is Critchley’s anti-heroic reading, and which two performers/writers carry it?
- What is the Situation, and what are Critchley’s four elaborations of it?
- Apply: “Wanting to have a conscience” is a second-order want. Name one first-order want of yours that the second-order want would reorganize, and say what “answerability” would concretely require of you this month.
Answer key
- Ontic attestation (Bezeugung): being-towards-death is formally right but needs existentiell testimony that finitude can grip an actual life; conscience is that testimony.
- Strictly nothing — no information, no instructions; reducible to one word: Guilty! Cordelia (“Nothing, my lord”) against Hamlet the soliloquizer (“oh Lord, shut up”).
- Dasein calls to itself — not God, genes, or superego — yet the call happens against our will, as a stranger voice: “Der Ruf kommt aus mir und doch über mich” — from me and yet beyond and over me.
- Guilt as lack, debt, owing: “I owe therefore I am”; “life is a ‘business,’ whether or not it covers its costs” (SZ 289); mortgage = death-pledge. It is the pre-moral source of morality — beyond good and evil (Nietzsche’s Genealogy II; Kafka: “We are guilty”).
- (1) Thrownness: I am a basis I never laid and can never get behind — I constantly lag behind my possibilities; (2) projection: choosing any possibility means enduring not having chosen the others. Dasein is suspended between two nothings — a double zero, permeated by nullity.
- Chosen: wanting-to-have-a-conscience (Gewissen-haben-wollen) — a second-order want that makes answerability possible; not chosen: having a conscience (we already have that by existing) or the content of the call.
- “Reticent self-projection upon one’s ownmost Being-guilty, in which one is ready for anxiety.” Acoustics: the call comes from soundlessness and calls us into stillness — ambient, not martial; “only in keeping silent does the conscience call.”
- Against self-mastery and the heroic reading: the analytic’s core is impotence — a double impotentialization; carried by Beckett (Molloy’s vigor “from my weakness, perhaps”) and Maria Bamford (“Weakness is the brand”).
- The authentic seizing-hold of space — the they-self “has no situation.” Elaborations: Aristotelian phronesis; Dreyfusian expertise; the political event (Badiou; Sartre’s fused group, May ’68); Debord’s Situationism — plus Bartleby for the passivity of resistance.
- Open; graded on the second-order structure being understood, not on the confession.
13 Anticipatory Resoluteness
The splice: anticipation (death, totality, the ontological) and resoluteness (conscience, authenticity, the ontic) modalize each other into anticipatory resoluteness. Critchley’s emphasis is repetition: the certainty of resoluteness is nothing but its constant reiteration — “authentic resoluteness resolves to keep repeating itself” (SZ 308) — Wiederholung as fetching-back, remorse as the Ayenbite of Inwyt, the again-biting of inner wit. Method becomes explicit: reading ourselves authentically requires hermeneutic violence, a countertug (Gegenzug) against our own falling; and the circle, again, is virtuous. Note the mood Heidegger allows himself for one sentence: alongside sober anxiety, “an unshakable joy” — Critchley’s joke that Freud appears in Being and Time after all, as Freude. The summit is ¶64 on selfhood: Kant rightly refuses to make the “I” a substance (a cogito without an ergo sum) but wrecks it with present-at-hand ontology; Descartes needed God to keep the self constant through the night; Heidegger has no God — so the self is nothing but the performance of itself, constant only in the repetition of resolute action, and inconstant the rest of the time. Critchley’s formula for the chapter, and arguably for his entire Heidegger: “We are our acts, nothing more.”
- Also Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, the Paralogisms (B edition) — skim for the “I think” that must accompany all my representations.
- Sidebar Hume on personal identity (Treatise 1.4.6) — the bundle theory Kant answers; “a great topic to raise at a dinner party.”
The hour
| 0:00–0:10 | Recap: draw the splice — which prior problem does each side answer, and in which register (ontological/ontic)? |
| 0:10–0:35 | Close re-read: holding-for-true and the Gewissen/Gewissheit wordplay; the sin footnote (“this ontology knows nothing about sin”) and Critchley’s suspicion that guilt is secularized original sin; hermeneutic violence; the ¶64 argument from Descartes’s God to the performative self. |
| 0:35–0:45 | Primary text: BT ¶62 (SZ 305–10) for sober anxiety and joy; then the last page of ¶64. |
| 0:45–1:00 | Test 13. |
Terms to own: anticipatory resoluteness · modalization · holding-for-true · Wiederholung · Gegenzug / hermeneutic violence · sober anxiety & unshakable joy · transcendental unity of apperception · self-constancy · the performative self.
Test 13 — ten questions
- Which two concepts fuse in this chapter, answering which two problems, in which two registers?
- Why does resoluteness only become fully itself when thought “all the way to the end” — and why is anticipation not a “fictitious possibility”?
- What is the relation between certainty and repetition here? Quote SZ 308.
- What is the Ayenbite of Inwyt and what does Critchley use it to teach?
- Define hermeneutic violence via the Gegenzug. Violence against whom?
- What does the footnote on sin say, and what is Critchley’s suspicion about the guilt analysis?
- Where is Freud in Being and Time, according to Critchley’s joke — and what serious point about mood rides on it?
- State Kant’s achievement and failure regarding the self, per ¶64.
- Why did Descartes need God for the cogito, and what replaces that guarantee in Heidegger? End with Critchley’s six-word formula.
- Apply: “The self is constant only in repetition.” Identify one commitment you re-choose regularly and one you merely inherited. What would “fetching back” the inherited one look like?
Answer key
- Anticipation (being-towards-death: totality, ontological/existential) and resoluteness (conscience: authenticity, ontic/existentiell); each modalizes the other — both are needed.
- Because only death is the outermost limit of potentiality — resoluteness not thought to the end could still be a regional, comfortable decision; and anticipation is attested (not fictitious) precisely by the lived experience of conscience.
- Certainty is not a mental state but a practice: “authentic resoluteness… resolves to keep repeating itself” (SZ 308 / BT 355) — being-certain of death is reiterating the relation to it.
- A Middle English title meaning “the again-biting of inner wit” — re-morse: conscience’s certainty as a biting-again, i.e., repetition.
- The countertug (a train pulling the other way) against our own tendency to fall: the existential analytic must do violence to everyday self-interpretation — violence against ourselves, not others.
- “This ontology, as a philosophical inquiry, ‘knows’ in principle nothing about sin” (SZ 306n). Critchley’s suspicion: if sin is not a rigorous concept, neither are falling, guilt, or anxiety — the guilt analysis reads like a phenomenology of original sin with God subtracted.
- As Freude, joy: “along with the sober anxiety… there goes an unshakable joy” (SZ 310). The serious point: authenticity’s mood is not gloom — assuming finitude releases a sober cheerfulness.
- Achievement: the “I” is not a substance — a cogito without an ergo sum, only the logical form “I think.” Failure: he interprets it within present-at-hand ontology, reinstating an isolated subject without world.
- God’s continuous creation guaranteed the self’s persistence (through sleep, through gaps); Heidegger’s replacement is performance — self-constancy just is anticipatory resoluteness repeated (SZ 322). “We are our acts, nothing more.”
- Open; strong answers see that fetching-back is active reappropriation, not nostalgia — the inherited commitment must be chosen again or released.
14 Ecstatic Temporality
“The apex of the existential analytic and the culmination of the book.” Care folds into time: the future as coming-towards (Zukunft/zukommen), the past as having-been (Gewesenheit), the present as making-present — and the strange reversal at the heart of it: what comes out of the future is my having-been; the past is “null, but not annulled.” The moment of vision (Augenblick, the glance of the eye) is kairos secularized: not Christ but Dasein as the fulfillment of time. Time cannot be said with the copula without freezing it, hence the notorious tautology — die Zeitlichkeit zeitigt sich, temporality temporalizes itself — Heidegger making the nouns “move, even dance and groove.” The class set-piece is the Taminiaux story from the Le Thor seminar: Heidegger shouting “Nein!” at every earnest answer to “what is Being and Time about?” before announcing: Dasein ist das Ekstatische — Dasein is the ecstatic one. “The kernel, the apex, the bee’s knees.” Primordial time is finite — endlich, “end-ly” — and finitude means coming back towards the double nullity: mortal, in motion, without ground. Then Critchley’s dissent, which your term paper may take up: against the primacy of the future, his “Originary Inauthenticity” argues for the primacy of the past.
- Also Guardian series part 8 (“Temporality”); Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety on the moment (øjeblik) — the acknowledged-unacknowledged source.
- Term paper Submit (to yourself, honestly) a one-page outline: thesis, three moves, the Critchley claim you will engage.
The hour
| 0:00–0:10 | Recap: map care’s three structural moments onto the three ecstases. |
| 0:10–0:35 | Close re-read: the coming-towards analysis; “the character of having-been arises from the future” (SZ 326); the Augenblick/kairos genealogy; the tautology as anti-metaphysical method; the four summary theses (SZ 331); Critchley’s critique. |
| 0:35–0:45 | Primary text: BT ¶65 (SZ 323–31) — slow reading; this is the ten densest pages of the book. |
| 0:45–1:00 | Test 14. |
Terms to own: the three ecstases · Zukunft/zukommen · Gewesenheit · Gegenwärtigen · Augenblick / kairos · ekstatikon · die Zeitlichkeit zeitigt sich · endlich (“end-ly”) · primacy of the future (and Critchley’s dissent).
Test 14 — ten questions
- Map the care structure onto the ecstases, all three pairs.
- What is the primary phenomenon of authentic temporality, and how must it not be understood?
- Explain “null but not annulled” and the reversal by which the past arrives from the future.
- Give the terminological genealogy of the Augenblick and state what replaces Christ in Heidegger’s kairos.
- Why does Heidegger resort to tautology — “temporality temporalizes itself” — and what later formulas parallel it?
- State the four summary theses of SZ 331.
- Tell the Taminiaux story and its punchline in German.
- What is finitude, in Critchley’s condensed formulation from this chapter?
- What is Critchley’s critique of ¶65, from which essay, and with what family example?
- Apply: Describe one decision you are currently facing in ecstatic terms: what comes towards you, what having-been it hands you, and what a moment of vision (rather than an endless weighing) would look like.
Answer key
- Ahead-of-itself ↔ future (projection/existentiality); already-being-in ↔ having-been (thrownness/facticity); being-alongside ↔ present (falling/making-present).
- The future — but as coming-towards (zukommen), Dasein’s letting-itself-come-towards-itself; not as a now that has not yet arrived.
- The thrown basis is null (I never chose it, cannot get behind it) but not cancelled: authenticity does not erase the past but changes how it is taken over — and it is from my projection onto death (future) that my having-been first comes to me as mine.
- Kierkegaard’s øjeblik (possibly via Luther translating Paul), rendering the Greek kairos, the fulfilled moment; in Heidegger the Messiah is replaced by Dasein itself — ecstatic temporality as the fulfillment of time.
- Because “time is X” reifies time via the copula into a present-at-hand thing; only tautological verbalization lets time be movement. Parallels: die Welt weltet; das Ereignis ereignet.
- Time is primordial as the temporalizing of temporality, making possible the constitution of care; temporality is essentially ecstatic; it temporalizes itself primordially out of the future; primordial time is finite.
- Le Thor, Provence, late 1960s: Heidegger asks the table what Being and Time is about, rejects every answer — being! Dasein! being-in-the-world! — with “Nein!”, then: Dasein ist das Ekstatische.
- Coming back towards the nullity that I am — the double nullity of thrownness and projection: mortal, in motion, existing without ground; time is “end-ly.”
- From “Originary Inauthenticity”: the past, not the future, has primacy — supported by the Hermann Heidegger paternity revelation (the overseer of Heidegger’s complete works was not his biological son: did that make him any less his father’s child?).
- Open; graded on the three ecstases being used structurally, not as clock-times.
15 The Time of the Everyday World
The everyday, repeated from the standpoint of authentic time — Critchley invokes Mark E. Smith again: “the three R’s: repetition, repetition, repetition.” Inauthentic Dasein is still ecstatic, just differently: awaiting instead of anticipation, making-present instead of the moment of vision (that “in-resoluteness-held-rapture”), forgetting instead of repetition — “an awaiting which forgets and makes present.” Beckett is the dramatist of this: Waiting for Godot as inauthentic temporality staged. The taxonomy of moods returns temporally — fear as bewildered making-present (the burning-house example: people save the most indifferent things), anxiety as what holds the moment of vision on the runway, hope as tickled feet (Anne Carson), equanimity versus pallid indifference — with the striking claim that resolute Dasein has no fear: anxiety is courage. Then §69(b): the genesis of the theoretical attitude from lifeworld praxis — Heidegger’s undeveloped existential conception of science, phenomenology as “pre-science,” the mathematical projection of nature behind our “obsession with data, statistics, modeling.” Critchley’s crucial distinction: this is a critique of scientism, not of science — and he defends Heidegger against Tugendhat’s decisionism charge by locating deliberation inside resoluteness. The chapter’s deepest note is the “enigma of everydayness”: in the moment of vision existence can master the everyday “but never extinguish it.” There is no permanent breakout from the cave. We leave; we return.
- Read Beckett, Waiting for Godot, act 1 — as a treatise on awaiting-that-forgets.
- Also Husserl, Crisis, §§1–9 (the lifeworld and Galileo) — the neighboring critique of scientism.
The hour
| 0:00–0:10 | Recap: write the 3×2 grid of authentic/inauthentic ecstases from memory. |
| 0:10–0:35 | Close re-read: the mood taxonomy (fear, anxiety, hope, equanimity); “anxiety is courage”; the genesis of theory and the “changeover” in the hammer sentence; Spielraum as leeway/play-space; the enigma of everydayness and the They as unchosen “hero.” |
| 0:35–0:45 | Primary text: BT ¶68(b) on forgetting and ¶71; then the Löwith teaser at the chapter’s end — Rome, 1936, one word: “Historicity.” |
| 0:45–1:00 | Test 15. |
Terms to own: Gewärtigen (awaiting) · making-present · forgetting · rapture (Entrückung) · equanimity · scientism vs. science · mathematical projection · formal indication · Spielraum (leeway) · the enigma of everydayness.
Test 15 — ten questions
- Give the full authentic/inauthentic pairing for all three ecstases.
- What is Beckett doing in this class? Make the claim precisely.
- What does the burning-house example show about fear’s temporality?
- “Resolute Dasein has no fear.” Explain, including anxiety’s relation to the moment of vision (auf dem Sprung).
- What is Critchley’s complaint about Heidegger on hope, and whose verse does he enlist?
- Define scientism as distinct from science, and state why opposing it is not anti-scientific.
- What is “pre-science,” and which 1924 text does Gadamer call the Ur-form of Being and Time?
- What is decisive about the mathematical projection of nature, and what later Heidegger concept does it prefigure?
- State the “enigma of everydayness” conclusion with the SZ 371 quotation, and connect it to Critchley’s originary inauthenticity.
- Apply: Chart yesterday as temporality: one episode of awaiting-that-forgets, one of genuine making-present, and (if you had one) anything approaching a moment of vision. What proportion of the day was “an awaiting which forgets and makes present”?
Answer key
- Future: anticipation vs. awaiting; past: repetition vs. forgetting; present: moment of vision vs. making-present.
- Waiting for Godot dramatizes inauthentic temporality: an awaiting that continually forgets (nothing is retained between the acts) and makes present (business, boots, hats), producing a present without rapture in which nothing happens — twice.
- Fear is a bewildered making-present: in the burning house people save “the most indifferent things” — fear leaps from next to next, disconnected from resolute projection; it forgets while frantically presenting.
- Fear comes from entities within the world; the resolute have already anticipated the worst — their mood is anxiety, which springs from Dasein itself and holds the moment of vision at the ready, like a sprinter on the blocks: anxiety as courage.
- Heidegger’s hope remains hoping-for-oneself; Critchley asks whether hope for another’s future is possible, and cites Anne Carson’s Antigonick: hope tickles your feet without realizing the soles are on fire.
- Scientism: the claim that the present-at-hand, natural-scientific view is the primary and best access to all phenomena. One can reject that priority claim and honor science as a founded, powerful, regional mode of disclosure — “anti-scientism does not at all entail an anti-scientific attitude.”
- Phenomenology as what precedes and grounds the sciences in lifeworld practices, proceeding by formal indication; the 1924 lecture “The Concept of Time.”
- Not its exactitude but that it discloses an a priori — a projected ontological framework within which nature can appear as calculable; it prefigures Gestell, enframing, and our data-and-modeling relation to nature.
- “In the moment of vision… existence can even gain mastery over the ‘everyday’; but it can never extinguish it” (SZ 371 / BT 422). Authenticity is transitory; the everyday is the enigmatic a priori it modifies — which is Critchley’s originary inauthenticity in Heidegger’s own words.
- Open; graded on honest use of the grid, not on heroic results.
16 Historicity and Politics
The hardest hour of the course, and the one where this course’s commitment to Critchley’s perspective matters most. Asked by Löwith in Rome in 1936 about the relation of his philosophy to his politics, Heidegger answered with one word: “Historicity.” Critchley takes him at his word: “the path from Being and Time to Heidegger’s political commitment to National Socialism leads through paragraph 74.” First the concepts: Dasein stretched between birth and death; historizing (Geschehen) as happening; history as rare — the power of a beginning; fate (Schicksal) as the individual’s authentic historizing; and then, because Dasein is Mitsein, destiny (Geschick) — the co-historizing of a community, a people, a Volk, freed “in communicating and in struggling.” The Volk is the counter-concept to the They — and its imagined political realization is what Heidegger, in 1935 and unrepentantly in 1953, called “the inner truth and greatness of National Socialism.” Critchley borrows the analysis from Lacoue-Labarthe, then answers it with the young Habermas’s phrase, which names this whole course’s method: thinking with Heidegger against Heidegger. His defusing move targets the hinge itself — authenticity: shift the weight from projection to thrownness, from the tragic-heroic (“shattering itself against death”) to comic acknowledgment and powerlessness — “the key to human existence is finding yourself ridiculous.” The chapter also holds the book’s tenderest page — the grandfather’s ring handed over by his Nan (“This is now yours, Si”), followed immediately by the Pulp Fiction gold watch — heritage (Erbe) as living repetition versus dead tradition, and the weird closing thought that we repeat from out of the future.
“The key to human existence in my view is finding yourself ridiculous, which is something I have perfected over the years.”Critchley, ch. 16 — comic acknowledgment against tragic-heroic authenticity
- Read Lacoue-Labarthe, “Transcendence Ends in Politics” (in Typography) — the argument Critchley “secretly” borrows; at minimum, read Critchley’s excursus on him carefully.
- Also Nietzsche, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life” — monumental, antiquarian, critical, which ¶76 maps onto the three ecstases.
The hour
| 0:00–0:10 | Recap: define Geschehen, Geschichte vs. Historie, Schicksal vs. Geschick. |
| 0:10–0:35 | Close re-read: the ¶74 argument step by step; the 1935/1953 “inner truth and greatness” problem (and the documented lie about leaving the text unchanged); the henology pages (Heidegger as thinker of the One; no positive plurality); Critchley’s “against authenticity” and the aspect change; heritage, Erwiderung, Widerruf. |
| 0:35–0:45 | Primary text: BT ¶74 (SZ 382–87) — read it whole, slowly, knowing what it enabled. |
| 0:45–1:00 | Test 16. |
Terms to own: Geschehen (historizing/happening) · Geschichte / Historie · Schicksal / Geschick · Volk · Erbe vs. Überlieferung · Erwiderung & Widerruf · “history is rare” · henology · comic acknowledgment.
Test 16 — ten questions
- What was Löwith’s question in Rome, 1936, and Heidegger’s one-word answer?
- Distinguish Schicksal from Geschick, showing why Mitsein forces the move from one to the other.
- What, on Critchley’s reading, is the Volk the counter-concept to — and what follows politically?
- Explain the 1935/1953 Introduction to Metaphysics problem in two steps: the lie, and what the lie proves about the retained sentence.
- Whose argument does Critchley borrow for the ¶74 analysis, and whose phrase does he adopt for his response?
- “History is rare.” Unpack it, with the thinker of revolutionary time Critchley links it to.
- Define heritage against tradition, and explain Erwiderung (with its built-in Widerruf).
- How does Nietzsche’s triad of histories map onto the ecstases?
- State Critchley’s defusing strategy precisely: which concept is attacked, which aspect change is proposed, and which register (tragic/comic) replaces which?
- Apply: Name one thing you have inherited — object, practice, obligation, wound. Describe taking it over as Erbe rather than Überlieferung: what would your reciprocative rejoinder to it be, and what in it would you disavow?
Answer key
- The relation between his philosophy and his political commitment to National Socialism; answer: “Historicity.”
- Schicksal (fate): the individual’s authentic historizing — anticipating death, taking over thrownness. But Dasein is essentially being-with, so historizing is co-historizing: Geschick (destiny), the happening of a community, a people.
- To the They: the Volk is the authentic communal “we” opposed to anonymous mass existence — and its political realization is what Heidegger identified in 1933, and still in 1935/1953 called “the inner truth and greatness of National Socialism.”
- He claimed the 1953 edition printed the 1935 lectures unchanged; in fact he cut passages (the Carnap discussion) — “so Heidegger’s lying, and he knows he’s lying” — while deliberately keeping the “inner truth and greatness” sentence: he still believed it.
- Lacoue-Labarthe’s (“Transcendence Ends in Politics”); the response is the young Habermas’s 1953 formula “thinking with Heidegger against Heidegger” — his first publication, and Critchley’s stated method.
- History is not the continuum of one damn thing after another but a seldom, transformative happening — the power of a beginning, seized in crisis and decision; linked to Benjamin’s revolutionary now-time (and, uncomfortably, to Schmittian decisionism).
- Tradition (Überlieferung) hands down contents that congeal into a dead past; heritage (Erbe) is the living, active handing-down-to-oneself of a possibility. Erwiderung: repetition’s reciprocative rejoinder to a past possibility — answering it, not re-enacting it — including a Widerruf, a disavowal of how “today” has worked that past out.
- Monumental ↔ future/to-come; antiquarian ↔ having-been; critical ↔ present/moment of vision.
- Attack the hinge concept, authenticity itself; shift the aspect from projection to thrownness and facticity; replace tragic-heroic pathos (shattering against death, my struggle) with comic acknowledgment, powerlessness, originary inauthenticity — “finding yourself ridiculous.”
- Open; graded on the Erbe/Überlieferung distinction doing real work and the rejoinder containing an actual disavowal.
17 Existential Time and Vulgar Time
The last chapter of Being and Time names the target the whole book has presupposed: the ordinary, “vulgar” conception of time. Learn the three levels — primordial ecstatic time; world-time (the datable, spanned, public within-time-ness of concern: “now,” “then,” “on that former occasion”); and now-time, the infinite, uniform sequence of nows that Aristotle’s Physics bequeathed to the entire tradition down through Hegel to Bergson. The vulgar conception arises by a double leveling off in which datability and significance are lost, and the motor of the leveling is falling: we cannot bear to look our finitude in the face, so we flee into the infinite time of the “one dies — but not yet.” This is the genesis of what Critchley (with Derrida) calls the tyranny of the present, the metaphysics of presence. Against it, primordial time is finite, reversible, ecstatic — and, Critchley adds on his own account, episodic: it drags, it spikes, it comes in blips and glitches (to hell, he says with Galen Strawson, with narrative ideas of the self). The chapter’s texture is Critchley at his most personal: time first shows itself in the sky; the peasant’s clock and the shadow; his Iceland 3 a.m. anecdote; and the beautiful tide sidebar — in the old languages tide is time, and Heidegger, thinker of rivers and forests, “is not a thinker of the sea.” Wittgenstein supplies the class motto: What does one philosopher say to another? Take your time. Inauthentic Dasein never has time; authentic Dasein always has time. And the long footnote on Aristotle and Hegel is the thread from which Derrida’s “Ousia and Grammê” unravelled the whole book — while the deleted sentence pointing to Husserl’s time-consciousness earns the chapter’s last laugh: “Philosophy is nothing if not parricide.”
- Read Aristotle, Physics IV.10–11 (time as the number of motion) — the source of now-time.
- Also Derrida, “Ousia and Grammê” (for the ambitious; at minimum know what it does and to which footnote).
The hour
| 0:00–0:10 | Recap: the three levels of time and the two features lost in leveling-off. |
| 0:10–0:35 | Close re-read: datability and span; the sky, brightness, the peasant’s clock; the tide sidebar; the eternity/nunc stans critique (“Protestantism is the gateway drug to atheism”); the Hegel correction; the Derrida footnote and the Husserl/Edith Stein deletion. |
| 0:35–0:45 | Primary text: BT ¶81 (SZ 420–28), hunting the leveling-off passage at SZ 422. |
| 0:45–1:00 | Test 17. |
Terms to own: world-time · Innerzeitigkeit · Jetzt-Zeit · datability · span · leveling off · nunc stans · the metaphysics of presence · reversibility · the episodic (Critchley’s addition).
Test 17 — ten questions
- Name the three conceptions of time and the ontological register of each.
- What three features structure world-time, and what everyday words express its datability?
- Trace now-time to its source text and through two later stations.
- What two things are lost in the leveling-off, and what drives the leveling?
- In what four ways does primordial time differ from now-time, per Critchley’s summary — and which of the four is his own addition?
- What is the first, natural clock, and what is the peasant’s clock?
- Make Critchley’s tide argument, including what it says about Heidegger’s landscape.
- What happens to eternity and the nunc stans on this analysis — and what does Critchley conclude about the book’s theology?
- State the Hegel correction of ¶82, and identify the essay that unravels the book from the chapter’s long footnote — plus what the deleted sentence pointed to.
- Apply: Wittgenstein: “Take your time.” Inauthentic Dasein has no time; authentic Dasein always has time. Diagnose your own week with this distinction — where did you “have no time,” and what would it mean, concretely, to have time there?
Answer key
- Primordial/ecstatic time (existential); world-time / within-time-ness (the time of ready-to-hand concern); vulgar now-time (present-at-hand infinite succession of nows).
- Datable, spanned, public; jetzt / dann / damals — now, then, on that former occasion.
- Aristotle, Physics IV (time as counted nows, the number of motion); through the whole tradition to Hegel (its most radical conceptual form) and Bergson (who “merely says the reverse”).
- Datability and significance (SZ 422 / BT 474); the driver is falling — fleeing finitude into the reassuring infinity of nows (“one dies, but not yet”).
- Finite (not infinite), reversible (present out of having-been out of future, not a one-way river), ecstatic (not uniform), episodic (drags and spikes, blips and glitches) — the episodic is Critchley’s addition, with Strawson against narrativity.
- The sun — the alternation of brightness and night (“time first shows itself in the sky,” SZ 419); the peasant’s clock is the shadow — one can be one’s own sundial.
- In Nordic languages and older English, tide is time: for coastal peoples the natural clock is the tide (even an olfactory clock — you can smell it change). Heidegger’s clocks are inland — rivers, hills, forest paths; “Heidegger is not a thinker of the sea,” and Critchley, for whom “the sea is primal,” counts that a real limit.
- Eternity as nunc stans is a divinization of vulgar now-time — a standing now, derived not primordial. Conclusion: Being and Time is a discreetly atheist book; to understand time we must give up eternity.
- Spirit does not fall into time (Hegel); Dasein is finite time and falls from primordial time into world-time into now-time. The essay: Derrida’s “Ousia and Grammê,” on the footnote at SZ 432–33; the deleted sentence pointed to Husserl’s time-consciousness — the teacher simultaneously credited and slapped: “philosophy is nothing if not parricide.”
- Open; graded on using the distinction structurally: having time is not having empty hours but being one’s time — presence in the situation rather than hurried awaiting.
18 Coda: Opening and Presence — and Your Term Paper
The coda does three things. It reads the book’s original design (two parts, six divisions, of which we have two) and then mounts Critchley’s polemic: the fragmentariness of Being and Time has been wildly exaggerated — the missing parts are largely reconstructible (Kant became the 1929 Kantbuch; Division 3 became The Basic Problems of Phenomenology and the 1962 lecture “Time and Being”) — and the cult of the provisional (“ways, not works”; what Critchley calls towardsism) is fake humility that licenses self-paralysis. It reads Heidegger’s marginalia and the 1964 lecture to propose the book’s true retrospective title: Opening and Presence — Dasein as the cleared opening; presencing from out of the source; Gelassenheit, releasement, out of Meister Eckhart. And it confronts the book’s astonishing final page, where Heidegger seems to take everything back in a flurry of rhetorical questions — prompting the most quotable moment of the course (“WTF, Martin?”) and Critchley’s ruling: both closing questions deserve a resounding yes. The final lessons, for the exam of your life rather than this course: the meaning of being human is finitude; being itself is finite and epochal; our age’s loss of a word for being is not only a loss but “the experience of possibility as such… a dizzying freedom”; and meaning is not hidden — “that ordinariness is the mystery.” Then Gadamer at breakfast in Perugia: Heidegger wrote one book, and thinking is “building castles in the air. All that there is, is air.” And Levinas’s verdict, which is also this course’s: we must leave the climate of Heidegger’s philosophy — but not for a philosophy that would be pre-Heideggerian.
“The activity of thinking is building castles in the air. All that there is, is air.”Gadamer to Critchley, Perugia, 1986 — the course’s parting word
- Read Heidegger, “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking” (1964) — source of the Opening and Presence retitling.
- Also Gadamer’s and Levinas’s closing verdicts as Critchley reports them — re-read the coda’s last five pages twice.
The hour
| 0:00–0:15 | Close re-read: the design of the treatise; the reconstruction of the missing divisions; “pathological provisionality” and towardsism; the marginalia; the final questions of SZ 437 and Critchley’s double yes. |
| 0:15–0:25 | Primary text: the last two pages of Being and Time (SZ 436–37 / BT 486–88), then the four final lessons in the coda. |
| 0:25–0:35 | Final short test (below) — the last closed-book exercise of the course. |
| 0:35–1:00 | Term-paper workshop: settle your thesis against the topic list and rubric below; write your opening paragraph before the hour ends. Heidegger on method applies to you now: “whether this is the only way or even the right one at all can be decided only after one has gone along it.” |
Test 18 — eight questions
- Reconstruct the original two-part, six-division design of Being and Time, marking what was published.
- Where can each missing part be substantially found, per Critchley?
- Define “pathological provisionality” and “towardsism,” and state the risk Critchley says they license in readers.
- What retrospective title did Heidegger propose, where, and what two concepts does it join?
- What is Gelassenheit, from whom does it come, and how does it fit Critchley’s conversion-narrative reading?
- What is Critchley’s position on the Kehre, the famous “turn”?
- What did Gadamer tell Critchley in Perugia — all three parts of it?
- State the two final questions of Being and Time and Critchley’s answers — then the four final lessons of the coda in one sentence each.
Answer key
- Part 1: the analytic of Dasein and temporality — Div. 1 (published), Div. 2 (published), Div. 3 “Time and Being” (unpublished). Part 2: the destruction of the history of ontology — Kant, Descartes, Aristotle (all unpublished).
- Kant → Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (1929); Descartes → the ¶¶19–21 critique already in Division 1; Aristotle on time → the long footnote of the final chapter; Division 3 → The Basic Problems of Phenomenology and the 1962 lecture “Time and Being.”
- The fetishization of the preparatory and provisional (“ways, not works”; “Notes Towards…”); it risks “the willful self-paralyzing of readers” — false modesty as an excuse never to conclude. “Have the courage of your convictions.”
- Opening and Presence (Lichtung und Anwesenheit), in “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking” (1964): Dasein as the cleared opening; being as presencing from out of the source.
- Releasement — from Meister Eckhart’s mysticism: the soul released from constriction; in Critchley’s reading, Heidegger’s thought keeps the shape of a conversion narrative — a liberation theology with God subtracted (“God is relaxed. And we have to be released and relaxed”).
- There is no Heidegger 1 and Heidegger 2 — no fundamental turning, only a deepening of the same matter: thrown projection and the appropriative event echo each other.
- That Heidegger wrote only one book (everything else essays, lectures, fragments); that it “failed” only in the sense of abandoning classical transcendental philosophy as the route to being; and that Heidegger spent his career “building castles in the air” — not a criticism: “The activity of thinking is building castles in the air. All that there is, is air.”
- “Is there a way which leads from primordial time to the meaning of Being? Does time itself manifest itself as the horizon of Being?” (SZ 437) — yes, and yes. Lessons: the meaning of being human is finitude; being as such is finite and epochal; our age’s lost word for being is the experience of possibility, a dizzying freedom; and meaning is not deep but under our noses — the ordinariness is the mystery.
The term paper
One paper, 3,500–4,500 words, completing the course. Its job is not to summarize Being and Time — eighteen tests have established that you can — but to think with Heidegger against Heidegger: take one concept, read it closely through Critchley’s interpretation, and then do something with it — extend it, apply it, or turn it against its author, as Critchley himself does with death, authenticity, and time.
Choose one topic (or propose your own in this spirit)
- The ontology of weakness. Reconstruct Critchley’s Levinasian critique of the nonrelational character of being-towards-death (class 11) and evaluate it: does “the only authentic death is inauthentic” destroy Heidegger’s argument or deepen it?
- Originary inauthenticity. Using classes 7, 14, and 15, defend or attack Critchley’s thesis that the past has primacy over the future and that authenticity is a transitory modification of an inauthenticity that is never left behind.
- Defusing paragraph 74. Does Critchley’s “aspect change” — from projection to thrownness, tragic to comic — actually sever the path from Being and Time to 1933, or does the problem lie deeper than authenticity?
- The two nullities and the self as performance. From “the null basis-being of a nullity” to “we are our acts, nothing more”: reconstruct the argument of classes 12–13 and test it against one rival account of personal identity (Kant, Hume, or narrative identity).
- The wrinkle of the Real. Does “Reality (not the Real) is dependent upon care” split the phenomenon Heidegger swore never to split? Follow the wrinkle from ¶43 into “earth” and assess whether Heidegger has an answer.
- Anxiety as an order, not a disorder. Develop Critchley’s claim that anxiety is rare, calm, and revelatory against the contemporary therapeutic framing (recall Rieff, class 7). What would it mean, practically and ethically, to “put anxiety to work”?
- Reticence. From “to be able to keep silent, Dasein must have something to say” to the reticence bar: build an ethics of discourse for the age of scribbling, idle talk, and the pathological collapsing of distance (classes 3, 6, 7).
- The octopus objection. If discourse is world-disclosure rather than vocal utterance, can the human monopoly on Dasein survive? Use classes 6 and 11 (animal death) to press Critchley’s question further than he does.
- A Lutheran atheism. Trace the conversion-narrative structure Critchley finds from anxiety through conscience to Gelassenheit (classes 8, 12, 18), and assess his claim that Being and Time marries Aristotle and Christianity “within atheism.”
- Time and tide. Take Critchley’s amendments to Heidegger on time — the episodic, the reversible, the maritime — and write the chapter Heidegger didn’t: what would a phenomenology of tidal, coastal, episodic time change in the analytic of ¶¶78–81?
Requirements
- A thesis stated within the first two paragraphs — an arguable claim, not a topic. Heed the coda: no towardsism. Do not write “Towards a Reading of…”; do not call your paper “notes.” Have the courage of your convictions.
- Close reading: at least four passages of Being and Time cited in the SZ/BT double format used throughout this course, each quoted and actually analyzed — not decorated with.
- Engagement with Critchley as an interpreter: at least one point where you state his reading precisely and take a position on it. Agreeing is permitted; agreeing without showing what the alternative would be is not.
- One interlocutor from the course’s orbit (Levinas, Arendt, Adorno, Derrida, Gadamer, Sloterdijk, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Beckett…) — used, not name-checked.
- Application: one page, somewhere, where the concept touches an actual life — yours or a concretely described other’s. This is Apply-Degger; the podcast’s title is an instruction.
- Clarity is a requirement, not a grace: “Everything — even in Heidegger — can be said clearly. Anyone who says otherwise is bullshitting you.” Jargon is permitted only where you have earned it by definition.
Rubric
| Criterion | What excellent looks like | |
|---|---|---|
| Comprehension of Heidegger | Concepts stated with the precision of the tests; German terms used correctly; the concordance geography (divisions, paragraphs) navigated without error. | 30% |
| Textual evidence | Passages chosen aptly, quoted accurately in SZ/BT format, and analyzed — the argument would collapse without them. | 20% |
| Engagement with Critchley’s reading | His interpretation represented fairly and specifically (not “Critchley says Heidegger is important”), and a genuine position taken on it. | 20% |
| Independent argument | A thesis that risks something; objections anticipated; the strongest version of the opposing view addressed. | 20% |
| Clarity & application | Prose a serious, curious non-specialist could follow; the one-page application illuminating rather than ornamental. | 10% |
Working schedule
| Class 9 | Choose a provisional topic; read the second half of the course with it in mind. |
| Class 14 | One-page outline: thesis, three moves, the Critchley claim engaged, the four SZ passages. |
| Class 18 | Workshop the thesis; draft the opening paragraph in the hour. |
| +1 week | Full draft. Then apply the course’s own medicine: read it aloud and strike every sentence that is idle talk. |
| +2 weeks | Revise and submit. Repetition is fetching back: the second draft is where the paper becomes yours. |
Final guidance, in the spirit of the course
Write the paper the way Critchley taught the book. Stay in the cave and describe the cave. Prefer the example under your nose to the grand abstraction — the hammer, the subway, the tide, the ring handed across a kitchen table. Let the German words work for you, but never hide behind them. When you reach the moment where your argument wants to trail off into “further research is needed,” remember the coda: answer your own question, yes or no. And when the paper is done and you find its imperfections — and you will — remember Gadamer at breakfast: thinking is building castles in the air, discovering their flaws, and building again. All that there is, is air. Take your time.