A common message in current architectural writing is to warn against ‘means-end thinking’, or ‘instrumental thinking’. For example, we might decide that we want to live in a home that has a constant temperature of 22 degrees centigrade, or that has a view to the south-east, or that has at least 120 square metres of area, and with these artificial ends in mind, we go about arranging them; we find the means, whatever and wherever those are in the world’s catalogue. And this—it’s said—is a bad way of doing things. The warning extends to architectural types; to think of whole buildings as objects serving our more abstract goals—a research facility, a learning resource centre, a shopping mall—is also to practice means-end thinking. The cost—it’s said—is twofold; the resulting construction will not be worthy of its inhabitants, and worse, through losing sight of what’s said to be our proper goal—to live well, and true to ourselves—we risk “spoliation” of our environment. Instead, architects should aim first at a better rooted relationship with places, with people and with customs of inhabitation and practical purpose. Not housing, schools, factories, but dwellings, workshops and gathering places of the community. Not needs or targets met, but people addressed—so to speak—‘in their authentic being’ (my phrasing). Here’s an example of the message, from Dalibor Vesely:
“Architecture has probably never abandoned completely its humanistic role, though in modern times this role has mostly been improvised. That approach may no longer suffice in a changing world increasingly dominated by instrumentally oriented expectations. To preserve its primary identity and humanistic role in the future, architecture must establish credentials on the same level of intelligibility as instrumental thinking, while at the same time it must integrate and subordinate the instrumental knowledge and the technical potential of human beings to their praxis. This is, in essence, my aim in broad outline …” (Vesely, ‘Architecture in an Age of Divided Representation’ (2004), p. 5)
The terms ‘means-end thinking’ and ‘instrumental thinking’ shouldn’t be taken to say that it is wrong to have a goal in building; instead, the idea in play here is that when our goals become culturally disconnected—when we are tending to do things for the sake of doing them; ‘because we can’, rather than in response to a shared cultural practice that gives our goals meaning—then something has gone wrong. Our thinking has become disordered. We should—so these writers say—try to restore a proper hierarchy of thinking. ‘Humanistic’ thinking (to use Vesely’s term for it) should come first; instrumental thinking should come second, and be used in support. To try to bring some clarity to what is often an obscure topic, in what follows I’ll use ‘abstract goals’ or ‘abstract goal-setting’ to refer to what these writers seem to be getting at when they say ‘means-end thinking’ or ‘instrumental thinking’.
Can Lis, Jørn Utzon’s holiday house on Mallorca
(1) The intellectual setting (in sketch form)
We got here, as I hinted at before, via the existentialist writing (although he is said to have rejected the label) of Heidegger. How? Heidegger’s core project (and for some, his main achievement) is to offer an alternative to the traditions of metaphysics. I’ll sketch this out. Most people—and, you’ll be reassured to learn, four out of five living philosophy specialists, by their own self-reports—believe that there is a world of things with independent existence outside of the mind that experiences and recognises these things: this is realism; the world is real. Most people, but not all people. There is an alternate view, which is that the things of experience are things of the mind, and we should be sceptical of the existence of, or at least of the appearance of, what some might take to be a mind-independent world. There are several variations of this line of thinking in philosophy, sometimes termed idealism, or anti-realism, depending on the version, and all of them tending to have a sophistication which I won’t try to address here.
And there are complications. We also like to predicate of objects that we encounter in experience; for example, we say “I see the roof is shiny” or “you’ll find the path is bumpy” in the confidence that many things are shiny or bumpy: that those things are alike in those ways; they have properties. There is then a range of views about what properties are. When we predicate, do we succeed in referring to anything besides the thing of which we predicate? If we do succeed in referring, is it to something somehow in the object (and only there), to something mental that groups objects together, or in referring do we call on something we might label a universal; something external to the mind, and whose location cannot be given?
Heidegger, in presenting his alternative, asks us to consider some ways in which we may encounter or make intelligible the things of the world. Things, says Heidegger, are encountered by us in the most basic way when we engage with them purposefully; he collectively terms things so engaged as ‘equipment’ and assigns to them a special kind of being he calls ‘readiness-to-hand’ (zuhandenheit). For examples, Heidegger points to everyday household things: when we use a hammer—when we engage purposively with a hammer—the hammer is equipment and has zuhandenheit. Many things, not just hammers, may have zuhandenheit, and they relate; they make together a totality (or perhaps a sort of network) of equipment. It is the character of our engagement with this totality of equipment that is key, rather than the sort of thing we engage with. (SZ ¶15) At other times we may regard things (and they may be the same things1) as ‘present-at-hand’ (vorhanden); such things are ‘in’ the world as the desk is—through Cartesian spatiality—in the room, and the room is in the university. (SZ ¶12) Despite our ability to give their location, there is, for Heidegger, a placelessness to things so considered. We still relate to these things that are only present-at-hand—indeed, to relate to things in this way has come to be a over-frequent and poor habit of ours, says Heidegger—but it involves a sort of reduction. When we relate to things as present-at-hand, we are thinking of them in a detached way, in a way characteristic of theory or science. We are looking at things as objects, with ourselves as subjects. And as long as we do this—as long as we treat things only as present-at-hand, as objects for our curiosity or exploitation—we will achieve for ourselves only an inauthentic way of being. Authenticity is found through engaging with things anew (to use a Heideggerism); by proper, resolute, rooted, purposeful re-connection with things as ready-at-hand. And it is this distinction—between the inauthentic and the authentic—that lies behind the idea of a hierarchy of thinking that we see in Vesely and other writers. The habitual abstract goal-setter looks likely to be inauthentic. The “humanistic” thinker, by contrast, is likely authentic.
As a metaphysical position, Heidegger’s system is not realism—in this picture the existence of things is in certain ways conditional on our experiencing them—but it is not straightforwardly idealism either. Heidegger does not intend that the “‘world’ [becomes] something ‘subjective'” (SZ ¶14). Beyond our encounters with them, things retain what we might think of as a mind-independent—if unintelligible—mere occurrence. There exists, still, a “categorial aggregate” which Heidegger terms ‘Nature’: a “totality of … entities which can be present-at-hand” (SZ ¶14; my emphasis).
Further, zuhandenheit and vorhandenheit are not the only kinds of being in Heidegger’s scheme: more fundamental still, for Heidegger, is the being that you and I have: a kind of being for which being itself ‘is an issue’. This he calls Dasein, or ‘there-being’. My intent is not to present a full characterisation of Heidegger’s philosophy, which is complex, and builds progressively from starting concepts such as these; rather, it is to recognise the point of departure (another Heideggerism) from conventional ontologies. Nor is it my intent to force Heidegger into terms of a realism-idealism distinction; the key thing of note here is that Heidegger breaks—intentionally, very much so—with prior terms of philosophical debate.
The philosopher Rudolf Carnap, in a sharply critical essay of 1932 (‘The Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language’), argues for much tighter control of expression in philosophical writing than he sees in Heidegger (whom he names). For Carnap, a term such as being, in philosophical writing at least, can be understood through assigning it the role of an ‘existence quantifier’; a thing x is (or is not)—this is the quantifier—and has property F (or does not have it). For example, something may have the property of being perceived (x is perceived), the property of being used (x is used), or the property of being self-aware (x is self-aware). In this scheme, existence itself is not predicated of something; there are not kinds of existence. It’s not my intent to come to a judgement on this specifically, even though my sympathies are more with Carnap. For the main thrust of Carnap’s (contemporaneous) criticism is that Heidegger is overreaching:
“The metaphysician believes that he travels in territory in which truth and falsehood are at stake. In reality, however, he has not asserted anything, but only expressed something, like an artist. [But] Lyrical poets … do not try to refute in their poem the statements in a poem by some other lyrical poet.”
And I think the implication of egotism in Heidegger—extreme egotism, even—is right. Heidegger relentlessly presents himself as getting at something of crucial importance. His metaphysical picture is to give a foundation to all sciences: “basic concepts determine the way in which we get an understanding beforehand of the area of subject-matter underlying all the objects a science takes as its theme, and all positive investigation is guided by this understanding”. (SZ ¶3) Indeed, his metaphysics is meant to overturn wrong thinking generally, and restore that which we have lost sight of. In a jarring passage in ‘Being and Time’ he writes (my emphasis):
“It would be unintelligible for Being-in-the-world to remain totally veiled from view, especially since Dasein has at its disposal an understanding of its own Being, no matter how indefinitely this understanding may function. But no sooner was the ‘phenomenon of knowing the world’ grasped than it got interpreted in a ‘superficial’, formal manner. The evidence for this is the procedure (still customary today) of setting up knowing as a ‘relation between subject and Object’—a procedure in which there lurks as much ‘truth’ as vacuity. But subject and Object do not coincide with Dasein and the world.” (SZ ¶13)
The construction “no sooner was … than it got interpreted” (admittedly here in Macquarrie and Robinson’s translation) is crude; a table banging assertion about the history of human thought2 that stands in contrast to the initially attractive, mystery-unfolding aesthetic of ‘Being and Time’. A big mistake has been made, Heidegger says; it must not only be commented on, it must be reversed.
(2) The farmhouse exemplar
Architectural writers, when they say that we should reduce our tendency to abstract goal-setting when we build, generally don’t start from Heidegger’s metaphysics. Instead, they take their cue from sections of Heidegger’s later writing; the so-called post-Kehre work, produced for the most part after Heidegger’s own active involvement in German fascism, and after the war.3 Heidegger helps in this, since his later writing is less technical (if still very difficult) and more figurative. What’s more, some of this later writing features buildings. In one particular passage, often quoted, Heidegger seems to give us an architectural exemplar; this, he seems to say, is how we should build:
“Let us think for a while of a farmhouse in the Black Forest, which was built some two hundred years ago by the dwelling of peasants. Here the self-sufficiency of the power to let earth and heaven, divinities and mortals enter in simple oneness into things, ordered the house. It placed the farm on the wind-sheltered mountain slope looking south, among the meadows close to the spring. It gave it the wide overhanging shingle roof whose proper slope bears up under the burden of snow, and which, reaching deep down, shields the chambers against the storms of the long winter nights. It did not forget the altar corner behind the community table; it made room in its chamber for the hallowed places of childbed and the “tree of the dead”—for that is what they call a coffin there: the Totenbaum—and in this way it designed for the different generations under one roof the character of their journey through time. A craft which, itself sprung from dwelling, still uses its tools and frames as things, built the farmhouse.” (‘Building, Dwelling, Thinking’ (1951))
Let’s consider this. In writing of “dwelling” and “[entering] in simple oneness into things” Heidegger looks to be informed by his own metaphysic of zuhandenheit: what is wanted is rooted engagement; not our habitual placeless, subject-object, abstract goal-setting. Let’s allow for now (remembering the prompting of writers such as Vesely) that “dwelling” or “entering in simple oneness into things”—that is, the authentic life4—is both possible and something worth aiming at. Still, we may doubt the accuracy of Heidegger’s description. It seems touristic, we may say. What are these houses really like? What has been left out? The phrase “by the dwelling of peasants” also strikes. Are these real people or archetypes? Who were they? How does he know of them? What does he know of them? What reports do we have of their thinking? Is the house itself taken to be evidence of that? If not, then what is?
The Black Forest Open Air Museum, Vogtsbauernhof
But let’s put these doubts aside. Let’s say that such a house, either as Heidegger describes it, or as we might find one, really does represent the thinking of its builders, and that we have a chance to to be as they were (that is, to dwell) by doing as they did, perhaps even literally. Yet to do as they did requires us to take note of features of the house; these gables, those windows, those beams, etc. Which features are the correct ones to take note of? Are we sure that none of what we see was put into place by deprecated modes of thinking? The history of Black Forest houses shows that earlier examples were built with living rooms facing the hillside, and not facing out, over the valley, as we might expect.5 At some time, a switch was made and later examples do have valley-facing living rooms. But why was this done? Can we be sure that no Black Forest farmers had the thought that it would be nice to look out at the valley, to observe it, and asked themselves what would have to happen to bring it about, whatever resource it might require, however unrooted the result might be? I suggest that we cannot.
Heidegger, of course, presents his exemplar and immediately disavows it:
“Our reference to the Black Forest farm in no way means that we should or could go back to building such houses; rather, it illustrates by a dwelling that has been, how it was able to build.”
So the farmhouse is only an illustration. We are not meant to literally construct with oak beams, or roofs of a certain angle, etc. Instead, we are only to see that the farmhouse was built by people who ‘had dwelling’, or who ‘dwelt’. But does it even illustrate this? The farmhouse is a more complex affair than Heidegger’s hammer. We may think we understand the hammer easily enough, it seems a thing of few parts, and Heidegger is perhaps right to suggest that we tend not to reflect for long on its composition or its circumstances when we use it; instead, we likely just go about our everyday hammering. But the farmhouse demands—at least if we are, in sincerity, building with awareness of it—to be thought about, to be analysed, in its societal dimensions as well as in its constructional aspects. At the same time, and for the same reasons just discussed, it is unsafe to assume that any of its features will guide us towards dwelling: there is too much historical obscurity to the farmhouse parts. But if the farmhouse does not reliably illustrate dwelling, it has no role to play. If we persist in wanting to go with Heidegger on dwelling—on the authentic life—we are pushed back to other parts of his writing. The illustration does no good.
(3) A problem of individual innovation
Let’s say that we decide to discard Heidegger’s farmhouse. What about our aim of learning dwelling? We might still look to learn dwelling by way of the rest of Heidegger’s writing. Will we succeed in this? There is an invitation, issued very early in ‘Being and Time’, to use the everyday—the things we usually do and say—as a way to gain insight. What is the everyday? Heidegger’s writing certainly evokes an everyday—affirmatively: field, farm and homestead, and also, with some disdain, the modern converse: newspaper, train, factory and apartment—but in the end he does not define the term ‘everyday’ by explicitly pointing to certain sorts of thing. The everyday, in Heidegger, is ‘a way to be’: it is for us to recognise, to admit to. We are to consider that which is ordinary for us. At the same time, we are prompted to consider this dullness in its diversity. For a start, there is that which has ‘phenomenal transparency’. When we use a hammer, we often don’t much notice the hammer itself; it becomes almost part of us. Similarly, we might take the train to work without much noticing the train.
The scope of the everyday—again in ‘Being and Time’—extends to include people: for example, the customers we may serve; we may ask ourselves if our work product is fit for them. Or at a slight remove, we may notice that our day to day world implies the presence of people; we may think that the train we are travelling in seems well suited for passengers in general. These people, in both cases, are Heidegger’s ‘Others’; figures understood as only lightly differentiated from ourselves. There is then ‘the They’; our conventional, mediocre, ‘levelled down’ everyday culture, habitually consumed by us with minimal reflection.6
Not everything within the everyday runs on rails. Sometimes things break; we then notice these things and cast around for ways to fix them, ‘lighting up the world’ in the process, says Heidegger. (SZ ¶16) (Such things are then ‘un-ready-to-hand’, a yet further category of being.) And sometimes we start to theorise about things (in a Heidegger example: ‘this hammer is heavy’). For Heidegger, this theoretical speculation, through forgetting the ‘place’ of what is zuhanden—through severing the traditional connections to the network of things that is our equipment—is automatically then the business of the vorhanden (present-at-hand) (SZ ¶69). This stipulation contributes to the completion of Heidegger’s ontology, in that we are given a rule for when a thing tends to pass over from one category of being to another. But this is also where I start to suspect that Heidegger’s distinctions within the everyday only imperfectly describe who we are, and will not do the job he intends. The scheme does not, I think, do justice to our routine creative practice, considered introspectively. Let’s call this a problem of individual innovation.
We clearly do innovate; all of us, at least at some time: the rooms in the farmhouse weren’t always on the valley side. In my experience even the everyday use of things, even the use of hammers, may be creative, and in our creative exploration we may or may not care about place; the rootedness that Heidegger stresses. Creativity often imports from abroad; the far is just as good as the near. While creativity does not defer to context—the context is there to be taken or left—at the same time it is not anti-contextual. There is a non-cognitive aspect to all this: it is not always obvious how behaviour that tries things differently has gotten started. Perhaps we could include this other thing into affairs, in a way that has never been tried before, we may think, having already mentally visualised the other, unrelated thing. It is not a matter of fixing things: we are not just averting loss, or seeking continuity. And although creativity may be informed by theory, or involve some optimising activity, it is not itself theorising or optimising. Nor is creativity something we do resignedly, with “a pallid lack of mood” (SZ ¶71): creativity is done with enthusiasm, it is not everyday or inauthentic in this sense. Last, creativity is not essentially to do with departure from something already established with us, or “something that has come down to us” (SZ ¶74): we are creative from childhood. So it is not authentic (in the Heideggerian sense) either. Creativity just does not, I think, fit cleanly into the Heideggerian system. Yet creativity is, in the more conventional sense of ‘everyday’, an everyday human practice just as the use of things is, or the theory-minded consideration of objects is. It can be considered basic; part of who we are in our first nature; something the phenomenological analytic should begin with.
This is a problem. Why so? Our thought, let’s recall, was to try to learn to live authentically; to learn dwelling. This looks to be a project of reform; of ourselves, of our communities. But how can this reform be carried out if it goes very strongly against the grain of our natures? If the creative impulse—just the thought of trying something in a different way—is something basic, something with us from birth, we are almost compelled to think of developing it instead of repressing it. But the path Heidegger offers involves repressing it, or even—in what might seem an improper move—denying it; not allowing it its natural place. For Heidegger often writes as if creativity were not basic, something already with us, but something to be arrived at.
“… the sculptor uses stone just as the mason handles it in his own way. However, he does not use up the stone. That happens in certain ways only where the work miscarries. Of course, the painter also uses pigment, yet in such a way that the color is not used up, but rather first comes to glow. Of course, the poet also uses the word, yet not as ordinary speakers and writers who must use up the words, but rather so that the word first becomes and remains truly a word.” (‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ (1950))
Heideggerian creativity looks to be a matter of mastery. Its pre-requisite is a mature appreciation of our situation; a recognition of its possibilities. Once this is achieved, we use our judgement to select, with skill and resolve, from the possibilities before us. If the creative activity is to amount to art, its proper aim is truth. And—or so Heidegger seems to imply—whatever activity we might be engaged in before we have this mastery is not creativity; perhaps Heidegger might assign what I’ve described as the creative impulse to curiosity, or novelty-seeking. But this vision is profoundly restricting. I seriously doubt it is a vision that a person who works to cultivate their creative impulse can be comfortable with. Creativity wants, or wants at the very least the option of: surprise, shock, untidiness, juxtaposition, contrast, rawness. And—as in the Picasso truism—it wants to retain, or even free, the child in us.
(4) A problem of specialisation
There is a second problem to do with innovation and change. Certainly Heidegger’s everyday tends to the conventional (indeed, our recognition of the conventional is key to his system). Hammers, in Heidegger, are for hammering nails. Thread is for sewing. Leather is for leather clothing. Still, we may decide to set about changing things. And when we set about this change, we may do so with a compelling abstract goal, the thing the Heideggerians say we should not do. But it’s worth thinking about why we would have such an abstract goal. I’d suggest that the answer to this is simply: not only are we the people we are, we are members of a society, and we know it. Our abstract goal-setting is not just a lapse.
It’s claimed by Heidegger (SZ ¶38) and others that no hierarchy is intended in Heidegger’s picture of authentic life; that it is not necessarily better to live in resolute, purposive engagement with our equipment, or worse to live in a state of ‘falling’, rehearsing the received views of the mediocre the They. But this cannot be taken seriously. The tenor of Heidegger’s output says the opposite. We are called by him to recognise our adriftness in the everyday and to step beyond it. Indeed, the later Heidegger is very clear that when it comes to the use of technology in particular, our inauthentic practice of treating things of the world as standing-reserve—as resources to be ‘ordered’ or ‘set in order’ in service of abstracted goals—is deplorable. At the very least enough Heidegger-inspired writers—such as Vesely, quoted at the beginning of this piece—have taken a stance such that we must question the idea that there is no hierarchy in Heideggerian authenticity.
So what would happen if we took what the Heideggerians say to heart? How would things turn out? We live in large, complex, societies in which it is difficult—and sometimes impossible—for any individual to have full sight of the interplay of production. We specialise, and in doing so our personal goals become somewhat simplified, and abstract. We will likely have very good sight of the challenges that are in front of us, and so we will aim to address them. At the same time, we may have poor sight of the means and ends of our actions; what we will draw on, and how the results of our efforts will fit. Nonetheless, we act. But it seems that this will lead to an attempt to order nature: the thing that Heidegger deplores. In acting in this way, as specialists, we will be directing the world’s stuff as a resource—in the process we might even become a sort of resource—and in doing so we will be acting inauthentically. Let’s call this a problem of specialisation: even if, as the Heideggerians say, it is desirable in principle for us as individuals to achieve authenticity in our life work—that is, we take on the appropriate degree of rootedness in our actions—in practice, since we are who we are, and we are acting within a collective, we often do not do so. Instead, we often adopt a more limited view of things; we become somewhat unrooted; we allow ourselves to be, so to speak, ‘part of something bigger’: indeed, we often think this is very much worthwhile.
For example, the photovoltaic effect was demonstrated in the nineteenth century but was not developed into a practical technology until the 1950s. Even then, the solar cell was not used for power generation until it was fitted to a satellite several years later. The developers of orbital vehicles wanted a way to make electricity in space, and solar cells were available (alongside other technologies—i.e. resources—such as fuel cells and radioisotope generators). The idea to use photovoltaics as a renewable energy source, making a contribution to the elimination of carbon fuels, followed several years after that. In this history, the discoverer of the photovoltaic effect likely acted (arguendo, I do not know Edmond Becquerel’s real motives) out of a joy of discovery, and perhaps with a vague idea of amelioration. What we can say for sure is that Becquerel had no notion of global warming; his discovery of the photovoltaic effect did not in any sense arise from the goal (which might be an authentic goal) of securing our shared habitat.
Now it is true that Heidegger is admired for his environmentalism, something that came to the fore in his later writing. This admiration has grown over time as the significance and extent of global environmental damage has developed. Adorno, writing in the post-war period, before environmental concerns were widespread, identified a conservative or reactionary quality in Heidegger (‘The Jargon of Authenticity’ (1964)). For Adorno, the ‘aura’ that attaches to authenticity in Heidegger tends to mask its reactionary status; the way that it wants to keep everything the same.7 But sometimes, clearly, it may be better to ‘keep things the same’, as in the case of preserving the world’s ecosystems. However, Heidegger’s environmentalism is founded in his picture of authentic life: that we face problems with the environment is, at least up until now, because we live inauthentically. This is how our history has worked out for us, he says. This is how we have turned. It does not matter that we might still be able to fix it: it is not a matter of revising our use of technology. It is important to see here how thoroughgoing Heidegger’s attitude is. As Hubert Dreyfus points out (‘Heidegger on the connection between nihilism, art, technology, and politics’ (1993)) for Heidegger, the implementation of an inauthentic (i.e. technological) fix for environmental harm would be a yet worse outcome than the environmental harm itself. Dreyfus quotes Heidegger:
“What threatens man in his very nature is … that man, by the peaceful release, transformation, storage, and channeling of the energies of physical nature, could render the human condition … tolerable for everybody and happy in all respects.” (‘Poetry, Language, Thought’ (trans. 1971))
So is Heideggerian authenticity really the place on which we wish to found our environmentalism? Heideggerians insist that no Luddism is intended in their view of things; that it is only a matter of subordinating technology to the goals arising from lives authentically lived. But we start from where we are. As with creativity, there is real joy in discovery and speculative work. Even though discovery and speculation may create a resource, it seems perverse to insist that every Edmond Becquerel should direct his or her activities authentically; if we did insist on it, would we ever have the benefit of their activity? As with Heidegger’s creativity, what the Heideggerians describe seems a poor fit for human impulses as we find them. Would human affairs directed along their lines leave us with any technology to subordinate? Is the reform in any way feasible? Could we bear it?
And indeed we have other ways to found our environmentalism or our other core aims. For example, if we see our environmentalism in terms of justice—that is, we face a task of resetting policy away from capture by certain interest groups—we will not need to go along with Heidegger. We will not need to see the challenge of sustainability in terms of our own supposed inauthenticity.
Conclusion
Some architectural writers seem to work backwards from ‘Building, Dwelling, Thinking’—finding the scene of a simple (if also sensual) life presented there appealing—to Heidegger’s earlier writing. In working backwards, they first support his normative demands (i.e. we should reduce our tendency to pursue abstract goals), they assign to those demands significant weight ‘because Heidegger’ (i.e. they come from authority), and only perhaps as a last step (if at all) they internalise a Heideggerian metaphysics. This does not seem like a happy place to be. Resilience to the Heidegger mystique is best obtained from working forwards instead. Is Heidegger’s philosophical scheme convincing? Is it better than alternatives, or is it (as Carnap seems to think) only something between psychology and fiction? And if it is convincing, does it give weight to Heidegger’s normative demands? If so, what does this mean for building? Note that if you find his metaphysics unconvincing, or just of no moral consequence, it is still open to you, as a designer, to pursue something we could call a ‘mindfulness approach’, or even a ‘psychology of Heidegger’. In this, we would pay careful attention to things of the world on the grounds that our engagement in this frame of mind is sometimes good, happy and productive. And we can be in sympathy with Heidegger’s environmentalism. But contra Heidegger, we needn’t think that our mindfulness or our environmental respect signifies a great truth. Heidegger anticipates this refusal:
“… this characteristic [of zuhandenheit] is not to be understood as merely a way of taking [things], as if we were talking such ‘aspects’ into the ‘entities’ which we proximally encounter, or as if some world-stuff which is proximally present-at-hand in itself were ‘given subjective colouring’ …” (SZ ¶15)
We are not to give things subjective colouring, he says. But we can. This choice is open to us.
And we can even agree that our pursuit of abstract goals is sometimes unsatisfactory, and sometimes destructive. Here, though, I think more caution is needed since the stakes are higher. We do not live and work in a world made only by us, or even by those near to us; we live together with millions of people, all working in specialisms, generally working in good faith, and creatively. In this collective of societies it is not always possible to have full overview of any given chain of processes. Nonetheless, we do find that parts of this diversified output can be successfully—if sometimes unexpectedly—imported into building, or in service of the environment. For example, someone has researched how air leaks from buildings, making the task of heating them harder; it is hard to see the goal-setting that has been done here as other than desirable thinking, and perhaps, in this moment, the most desirable thinking. Beyond individual buildings, someone has researched the effects of certain approaches to urban planning, to transport planning, also with lessons for the way we build and for the environment. Even as we retain traditions—if we retain them—we may choose to modify them: rationally, imaginatively, instrumentally. Or we may choose to abandon them: again, rationally, imaginatively, instrumentally. Wherefore then a hierarchy of thinking?
1. Most writers seem to agree that one and the same thing may be both zuhanden and vorhanden. I’ve found one essay that argues against it.
2. As Macquarrie & Robinson’s translation notes laconically on page 133, the section of ‘Being and Time’ in which Heidegger intended to substantiate this “has never been published”.
3. Heidegger’s anti-Semitism was categorically established in 2014 with the publication of his private journals.
4. I’m aware that the conflation of dwelling with the authentic life is a rough one. Nonetheless, Heideggerian dwelling is intimately linked to Heideggerian authenticity, and the latter is needed to understand the former. For a detailed discussion of this topic, see Julian Young (‘The Fourfold’, in ‘The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger’ (1993))..
5. See Hermann Schilli, ‘Ländliche Haus und Hofformen im alemannischen Gebiet Badens‘ (1951).
6. The They (das Man) represents Heidegger at his most seductive and the passages where the idea is introduced are almost guaranteed to produce an ‘a-ha!’ moment. But the They is also an aspect of ‘Being and Time’ in which the historical and cultural context (Weimar Germany) overtops the author’s effort to make the work timeless. Compare the They with, for instance, a deeply pessimistic passage in Spengler’s contemporaneous (and very widely read) ‘Decline of the West’ (1923): “The people reads the one paper, ‘its’ paper, which forces itself through the front doors by millions daily, spellbinds the intellect from morning to night, drives the book into oblivion by its more engaging layout, and if one or another specimen of a book does emerge into visibility, forestalls and eliminates its possible effects by ‘reviewing’ it”. ‘Being and Time’ is distinctive in that it aims to systematically incorporate mood into its description of the human situation. For example, anxiety is said by Heidegger to provide an opportunity or even a prompt for philosophical reflection. Nonetheless, you suspect that the author, perhaps like Spengler, was disadvantaged by the state of the psychology of the time. The idea that mood (or emotion) might produce cognitive distortion looks to be missing. And it is hard to read Heidegger’s description of the They (or Spengler) without seeing a cognitive distortion. The media and our media habits may be bad, but are they that bad?
7. The French philosopher Emmanuel Faye goes further, and identifies Heidegger’s philosophy as fascistic both in its inspiration and in its working through (‘Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy’ (2009)). Faye repeatedly draws attention to ¶74 of ‘Being and Time’, which talks of an authentic collective Dasein, indifferent to both the past and “progress”, that will discover itself in a “moment of vision”.
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