Between Being and Thinking: Consciousness Reconsidered
Heidegger’s Reframing of How We Perceive the World and Ourselves
Martin Heidegger is one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. In 1927, at the age of thirty-eight, he published his magnum opus, Being and Time, which received immediate acclaim. About five years later, he joined the Nazi Party. This association has since tainted his reputation as a prominent philosopher.
Before Heidegger, Western philosophy centered on the individual mind and how each person perceives the truth about the external world. Plato claimed there is another perfect external realm, known as the Form. Aristotle believed that truth is inherent in objects and can be discovered through empirical studies. After detaching himself from the world around him, Descartes concluded that truth is revealed in the rational mind, which is distinct from the body.
Meanwhile, these philosophies have created dichotomies that are deeply ingrained in our thinking to this day: subject versus object, mind versus body, and internal versus external worlds.
Heidegger’s philosophy transcends these binaries. It focuses on more fundamental aspects of being human, particularly the essence of human existence in everyday life, which, he believed, had been overlooked by previous philosophers. And he studied this topic in such an original way that he created new terms to build his philosophy from the ground up.
American philosopher Taylor Carman writes in the preface of Being and Time: “Heidegger radically changed our understanding of our place in the world, what a ‘world’ is, what it means to be human, and what it means to think philosophically.” It is out of the scope of this article to discuss his entire philosophy. Instead, I will focus on a few key points that have struck me the most, and how they offer a new lens through which to examine consciousness and its role in human existence.
Referential Totality of Being in the World
In his book Being and Time, Heidegger calls the most fundamental aspect of being human “Dasein“, with the English translation as “Being.” His approach is to define Being ontologically (i.e., the nature of being and its existence), as opposed to epistemologically (i.e., what constitutes truth and how we can be certain it is the truth). In one way or another, most philosophers before him focused on the latter.
For Heidegger, one essence of Being is being there “in the world“, where the human and the world are an inseparable unity. Specifically, the most fundamental human existence is its “dwelling” in the world, encompassing its “coping” with objects and interacting with others within social norms.
According to Heidegger, we are part of the world from our birth. The meaning of the world reveals to us for our needs, and must be interpreted and understood within its related whole. This holistic worldhood includes three key constituents: social connections, involvement with equipment, and everyday activities.
Social Connections
First of all, each of us shares the world with others. The world already exists before us, and we are constantly being influenced and shaped by it through the acquisition of particular social norms, language, and expected behaviors. As such, our individual uniqueness is always “leveled” and “averaged,” more or less, toward a universal oneness in the world. Heidegger writes:
Primarily, it is not “I,” in the sense of my own self, that “am,” but rather the others, whose way is that of the “one.” In terms of the “one,” and as the “one,” I am primarily “given” to “myself.” Primarily Dasein is “one,” and for the most part it remains so.
Yet we are so familiar with the world that most of the time we are “oblivious” to it. The social role or identity of oneself is acquired from everyday involvement with others and society, before one realizes it or acts upon it. Moreover, our goals and conceivable future possibilities are not simply our own, but are connected to and interwoven with the public world, as Heidegger says:
Dasein is with equal originality being-with others and being-amidst intraworldly beings. The world, within which these latter beings are encountered, is…always already a world which one shares with the others.
Dealing with Equipment
Second, the essence of our relationship with the world is reflected in our use of tools and equipment, which are first made available and then gradually revealed to us for our understanding and grasping. The meaning of equipment is not about what material it is built of, what the underlying physics laws are, or the engineering mechanisms behind it. Instead, it depends on how an individual uses or intends to use it.
Heidegger emphasizes that the interaction between a human and equipment defies the traditional binary view of subject versus object. We need to look at them as a whole, where a person, objects, and a society all fit together.
From his perspective, every piece of equipment is interconnected with multiple other pieces of equipment. For example, when a hammer is available for people to use, the iron it is made of must have been mined, shaped, and assembled using different equipment operated by other individuals. These processes have a direct impact on the availability and quality of the hammer. It is these interwoven relationships that constitute a “referential totality,” which extends beyond the conventional subject-object dichotomy.
Additionally, equipment includes features, usage, and services expected by society. When a person uses equipment, they become just one part of the large, interconnected social web, sharing similar desires, intentions, and skills with others. Heidegger writes:
Taken strictly, there ‘is’ no such thing as an equipment. To the Being of any equipment there always becomes a totality of equipment, in which it can be this equipment that it is. Equipment is essentially ‘something in-order-to…’. A totality of equipment is constituted by various ways of the ‘in-order-to’, such as serviceability, conductivenss, usability, manipulability.
School systems have us acquire knowledge first, primarily from books and theories, and apply it later, when we realize that most of what we learned has been left behind. On the contrary, as Heidegger points out, learning from direct involvement with things and experience is “ontologically” more fundamental than acquiring knowledge per se. He refers to the words “coping” and “dealing” as processes that involve hands-on learning and problem-solving, gaining feedback in real-time, through which skills are developed and proficiency is achieved.
Based on traditional philosophy, science aims to discover objective truth without subjectivity, leading to rapid technological advances in modern society. On the contrary, Heidegger’s view is to examine the relationship between humans and technologies closely. Before adopting a new technology, we should reflect on its usefulness and our motivation for using it. Instead of focusing on the urge to know how it works, we must first consider how it is relevant to our daily lives and what the potential impacts could be when we engage with it.
Everyday Activities
Third, the worldliness of Being emphasizes that human existence is rooted in their everyday activities, which are about doing rather than thinking, including cooking, working, playing, walking, and social gatherings with family and friends. For Heidegger, contemplating philosophical or mathematical problems, theories, and beliefs is secondary, which, in fact, takes a much smaller proportion of humans’ time. Heidegger urges us not to ignore the most basic. In Heidegger’s words:
“In everyday terms, we understand ourselves and our existence by way of the activities we pursue and the things we take care of.”
During these activities, humans can become so absorbed in the action itself that both the equipment and the self recede into the background.
It is through these everyday practices that human develops understandings of their existence through interpretations. And this understanding is not the Platonic knowledge we usually discuss, but rather the subconscious skills, habits, and intuitions that are gradually built in. For Heidegger, this “understanding of Being” is an embodied characteristic of Dasein, in which the elements of person, equipment, culture, and society are unified.
In sum, Heidegger strives to define the most “primordial” aspects of being a human. One of his central points is that an individual can’t be examined or studied in isolation. Instead, it is oneness rooted in and shaped by its rich interwining relationships and involvements in the surrounding world. The concepts of subject versus object or the self versus others do not apply here. Human existence needs to be examined as a referential whole.
The Role of Consciousness in Everyday Life
In our everyday activities, our attention is focused on our own task at hand. When I cook, my attention naturally attends to washing, chopping, cooking, and finally serving. When I walk my kid to the school bus stop, I engage in a conversation with her while watching for the bus to come. In both cases, I don’t spend time in “experiencing the self.” My consciousness operates through a sequence of interactions with the world, unlike the kind that most philosophers, including William James, refer to through self-reflection or solitary thinking.
During these everyday practices, unconscious and conscious processes operate in harmony to accomplish the task at present. Our attention flows naturally, focusing on one thing at a time, while the rest operates subconsciously in the background.
Those seemingly mundane moments are precisely the transcendent “flow” states, which we usually call out as occurring during creative activities (e.g., drawing, playing the piano) or when experiencing the feeling of awe in nature. As psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihaly writes:
In this sense [transcendence], meditation or concentration on something outside one’s own psyche can produce self-forgetfulness and therefore loss of self-consciousness, and in this particular sense of transcendence of the ego or of the conscious self.
Heidegger never explicitly discusses states of mind. He believes that the more essential state of Being is for humans to become absorbed in their daily activities within a world of connected totality, when both the subjective self and object recede to the background.
The philosophical tradition refers to consciousness in which the self stands at the center of its own existence. For Heidegger, most human activities are not deliberate, nor do they result from a self-referential mental state. He acknowledges that self-deliberation is needed when a problem, such as a machine not functioning or an unexpected situation, arises due to the unavailability of something or someone pivotal.
Moreover, Heidegger recognizes the culture’s influence on the mind as an inseparable part of Being. As Professor Hubert Dreyfus comments, “Man is the result of a cultural interpretation; his culturally defined characteristics constitute his facticity.” This influence is not from Cartesian thinking, but from everyday existence and practices from the outset.
With that said, defining consciousness solely through personal experience and introspection appears to be too narrow and self-limiting. Instead, we should explore consciousness in a broader context, including its role in everyday activities, its dynamics with unconsciousness, and its connections to public and collective culture.
What is “I”?
Interestingly, although Heidegger’s philosophy is about humans, Being is manifested through its relationships and interactions in the world, rather than through the self “I”. For Heidegger, the latter is something that requires constant interpretation. He writes:
If the “I” is an essential characteristic of Dasein, then it is one which must be interpreted existentially. In that case the “Who?” is to be answered only by exhibiting phenomenally a definite kind of being which Dasein possesses.
This aligns with the depictions of human nature in great literature. Their protagonists constantly ask, “Who am I?” while the answers emerge through observing their own actions, hearing from others, and analyzing the consequences of their dealings. The self is constantly changing, and can’t be understood by looking inward alone. The greatness of Shakespeare’s Hamlet comes from his journey through losing and rediscovering himself. As Harold Bloom says, “Hamlet, as a character, bewilders us because he is so endlessly suggestive.” An essence of Being is the self-interpretation that leads to self-discovery and understanding of its complex roles in the world.
In everyday activities, our consciousness concentrates on dealing and coping, which involves perceptions, assessing situations, and initiating and completing actions. “I” is a constructed concept that becomes self-centered when a person is self-aware and thinks deliberately. In Heidegger’s words:
[Dasein] finds itself primarily and usually in things because, tending them, distressed by them, it always in some way or other rests in things. Each one of us is what he pursues and cares for. In everyday terms, we understand ourselves and our existence by way of the activities we pursue and the things we take care of.
Heidegger does not deny the existence of the self; rather, he thinks the self isn’t an essence of Being but a derived property. It could be a role in an involving relationship, an actor in the present task, a being located in a space in relation to others, bearing the memory of previous experiences in the world. The self is fluid, only meaningful at the present moment of a human’s everyday life.
Why are we conscious?
As discussed in another article, William James identified five properties of consciousness, including privacy, ever-changness, continuity, multiple selves, and attention.
Based on Heidegger, however, consciousness is not entirely private, nor is it continuous (as it is interluded with actions). Additionally, the self often disappears when one person is fully absorbed in the activity itself. Even the attention now is worth a second thought—it is not simply for the subject to focus on an object or the self; attention can also focus on something in between, such as a sequence of actions or back-and-forth interactions.
Why do we need consciousness? This is a question that the phenomenological definition of consciousness, especially the concept of “qualia“, can’t answer. A purely private experience, such as a color, does not offer conceivable adaptive value to humans and animals.
Based on Heidegger’s examination of Being, consciousness is necessary to engage in everyday activities, dealing with equipment, and socializing with others to sustain human existence. Its purpose becomes obvious and, in fact, makes much more sense.
Neuroscientists have long pondered whether consciousness plays an essential role in humans’ social nature. Michael S. A. Graziano and Sabine Kastner propose a novel hypothesis that consciousness enables humans’ social perception and underlies social intelligence. For example, consciousness allows one to “read” others in their social relationships or their involvement with shared objects (e.g., someone gazing at a cup). This “other” could be the self sometimes, leading to self-awareness. This hypothesis gained support from the neuroscience community. Psychologist Chris D. Frith writes:
I believe we have all been misled by the long-standing idea that consciousness is private. On the contrary, conscious experience is the one outcome of our brain’s information processing that can be shared with others. It is this sharing that provides the value of consciousness…. It has a major role in enabling the richness of social interactions.
According to Heidegger, an individual’s consciousness is initially shaped and influenced by the collective consciousness of others. Through dealing with equipment or communicating with others, our consciousness is constantly shared with others. This “public” nature of consciousness explains why social media has created a pervasive impact on human lives.
After all, every person possesses their own brain, which gives rise to the unique individual consciousness. Yet this consciousness serves to connect the individuals in their shared society. When viewed from a broader perspective, consciousness is not purely private; it is also public, due to the inherently social nature of humans.
The “Worldhood” Perspective
From Plato to Descartes, traditional Western philosophy has set the decree that each of us, as a detached subject, analyzes the external world as an object. There is nothing wrong with that. Yet, Heidegger points out, it is already at an abstract level suitable for scientific study, and the very human existence, “Being in the world,” comes prior, which should be examined as relational and a referential whole.
Overall, Heidegger offers a unique perspective on “worldhood,” allowing us to view our reality from a fresh angle. Consciousness is just one example among many. Under the same lens, it becomes much clearer to think through many previously fuzzy questions, from AGI to the meaning of life, from free will to personal authenticity. I would pause for now, but leave them as food for thought for the future.