From the Visual to the Auditory in Heidegger’s Being and Time and Augustine’s Confessions

1.1 Heidegger’s Criticism of Metaphysics

Attributing to Heidegger a visual bias does not seem to square with the facts. Jussi Backman explains:

Undoubtedly the most influential interpretations of Greek thought as a metaphysics of vision and visibility, and of the implicit understanding of being underlying this imagery, are those of Martin Heidegger, who develops his readings into a critical account of the foundations of the Western metaphysical tradition as a whole.^[3]

According to Backman, Heidegger traces the conflation of idea (aspect, look, visible figure)^[4] with the meaning of being that is characteristic of Western metaphysics, to the ancient Greeks. In support of this claim, he highlights a lecture course in 1940 “European Nihilism” in which Heidegger characterizes the Greeks as a “visual people” who therefore, “experienced the being of beings as presence and constancy.”^[5] Indeed, Heidegger cites Augustine’s Confessions X.35 and relates that the Father of the Church, “noted the remarkable priority of ‘seeing’ in conjunction with his interpretation of concupiscentia.”^[6] Heidegger thus acknowledges that the eyes are prone to indulge carnal desires and curiosities of which “metaphysical seeing is a variation.”^[7] Clearly, he was aware of the role of modes of perception in shaping experience and interpretation. Hence, in contrast to the visual bias that underscores metaphysics, he turned his attention to logos, hearing, and speaking. They are pronounced in “On the Way to Language” (1959), which is replete with metaphors of listening. However, they are underdeveloped in Being and Time. Heidegger thus acknowledges that his turn toward language and “reversal” are prefigured in the division of Being and Time that he did not write.^[8] At the same time, after Being and Time, he did not return and reinterpret the features of Dasein, e.g., death and social-being, accordingly. As Jean-Luc Nancy says, “after Being and Time most of the motives of the ‘existential analytic’ disappear from Heidegger’s thinking […].”^[9] This creates a creative space in which to place Augustine’s conversion experience, which maps onto Heidegger’s visual bias and an auditory disposition toward which he points.

1.2 Worlds Disclosed to Seeing and Hearing

Patrick Heelan writes, “I conclude that visual perception – and by analogy all perception – is hermeneutic as well as causal: it responds to structures in the flow of optical energy, but the character of its response is also hermeneutical, that is, it has the capacity to ‘read’ the appropriate structures in the World, and to form perceptual judgments of the world about which these ‘speak’.”^[10] Hearing is not merely sound waves striking the tympanum of the ear, seeing is not merely the impression of light waves on the retina of the eye. Modes of perception are also ways of being-in-the-world. Indeed, perceptions are formed by the worlds into which we are thrown and likewise reshape those worlds of meaning. They are as distinct from one another as oral, literate, and digital civilizations. Since Heidegger’s phenomenological-ontology moves between seeing and hearing, it is fitting to describe their characteristics and the worlds they disclose to us.

The senses of hearing and seeing are distinctly different from one another. Although sight is prone toward light that clarifies spatial relations and forms, colors, and contours, hearing is fitted for environments without light in which sounds prevail. When the source of light is extinguished, hearing becomes acute. In contrast to vision, which has an intentional directedness, frontal, and lateral, hearing is receptive to a sheer plurality of sounds in all directions. David Espinet relates that it is receptive to polyphonic landscapes of acoustic space.^[11] In the words of Walter Ong, “vision objectifies, speech personalizes.”^[12] His insight introduces perhaps the most pertinent difference. On the one hand, to encompass the widest possible field, sight facilitates separation or distance between knower and object known. René Descartes’ methodical doubt thus aims to divest the observer of personal relations with objects of knowledge for the sake of clarity of certainty. Coupled with the forward-facing direction of seeing (projection), this yields a proclivity for the predication and control of beings before they appear to us. This does not preclude focusing on details and analysis but rather ensures that the observer is inoculated against being moved emotionally by that which is scrutinized.

On the other hand, auditory cognition behooves total immersion in an environment of which the “observer” is always already a part and therefore collapses any pretense toward a firm and static standpoint allegedly distant from things. After remarking on the uncertainty of the spoken word Jacques Ellul writes, “I know that a kind of electric current is established between us; words penetrate him, and I have the feeling that he either reacts positively or else rejects what I have said. I can interpret his reaction, and then the relationship will rebound, accompanied by a rich halo of overtones.”^[13] Ellul experienced clarity in understanding not through definitions and concepts but instead, through the “electric currents” of sound and feelings set in motion by voices and “body language.” From participation in an environment, in which the auditory disposition toward beings is at home, as Don Ihde says, the “auditory dimension from the outset begins to display itself as a pervasive characteristic of bodily experience.”^[14] The auditory dimension is a bodily experience because, as Murray Schafer says, “hearing and touch meet where the lower frequencies of audible sound pass over to tactile vibration (at about 20 hertz).”^[15] We feel notes in our stomach and feet, our bones themselves conduct sounds. Hawk elaborates and says that sound is not experienced through a single sense (hearing) but in addition is felt with the body and seen with the eyes (we see vibrations).^[16] He develops these indications of an embodied auditory disposition that is responsive to the material force of sound into the notion of “rhetoricity.” After citing Diane Davis,^[17] he writes, “Rhetoricity is the necessary condition of response as a function of being-in-the-world – the capacity or ability to be affected and persuaded that is prior to language and subjectivity.”^[18] Prior to language and acts of consciousness, we live in an ambient environment of interconnectivity and move in time to material changes in sound and vibration. “Rhetoricity” is an unavoidable pre-subjective and pre-objective relationship (“inessential solidarity”) that exceeds individuals – in “rhetoricity,” the subjectivity of the subject is completely displaced by “total immersion.”

1.3 Heidegger’s Visual Bias

Heidegger writes in 1923, “Companions in my search were the young Luther and the paragon Aristotle … Kierkegaard gave impulses, and Husserl gave me my eyes.”^[19] Referring to the same years, he reflects:

The clearer it became to me that the increasing familiarity with phenomenological seeing was fruitful for the interpretation of Aristotle’s writings, the less I could separate myself from Aristotle and the other Greek thinkers. Of course, I could not immediately recognize the decisive consequences my renewed preoccupation with Aristotle would have.^[20]

After expressing perplexity about how to go about the method of phenomenology, Heidegger writes, “Husserl’s teaching took place in a step-by-step training in phenomenological ‘seeing’ which at the same time demanded that one relinquish the untested use of philosophical knowledge … I myself practiced phenomenological seeing, teaching and learning in Husserl’s proximity after 1919.”^[21] His training in this manner of seeing culminates in the “formal indication.” The latter refers to a method with which he intends to achieve objectivity in a nonobjective way. Although sciences focus on variations in a scientific object (objectified presence) and thereby pass over the world and what it means “to be,” Heidegger revives the latter with a formally indicative method or way of conceiving things. In this case, concepts are “formal” because they are derived from a prior way of existing in the world.^[22] He thus aims to steps behind theory, classifications, and “what-content,” to their source in prescientific concrete historical existence. The “ordering” of his descriptions follows a phenomenological explication of relational meanings^[23] and retains “objectivity” without resorting to a “bird’s eye view.” Heidegger was aware of the danger of slipping into the latter.^[24] Nevertheless, his penchant for interpreting experience based on sight hampers his capacity to both respond to the call of conscience and understand what Plato said.

2.1 Call of Conscience

As a result of unreflectively prioritizing sight in his phenomenological-ontology, Heidegger tends to confuse distinctly different worlds with one another by expecting the visual to take responsibility for an auditory comportment toward beings. For example, Being and Time, section 34 states that discourse (Rede) is the existential–ontological foundation of language and therefore equiprimordial with attunement and understanding.^[25] Attunement of discourse gestures toward the receptivity of hearing in an auditory disposition toward beings, which surfaces in Heidegger’s criticism of the everyday mode of being-in-the-world. According to him, we live in worlds corrupted by inauthentic speech that has been coopted by the pleasure/curiosity of the eyes.^[26] For the sake of authenticity, it is crucial to project ourselves toward “non-Being” and respond to the call of conscience. He writes, “The call of conscience has the character of summoning Da-sein to its ownmost potentiality-of-being-a-self, by summoning it to its ownmost quality of being a lack.”^[27] This hearkens to Paul in Corinthians, “For we walk by faith, not by sight (eidos).”^[28] The prioritization of hearing and the word (incarnate) stand in marked contrast to the Greek primacy of sight.^[29] And yet, Heidegger’s visual bias arguably mutes the summons. He disavows the “vulgar interpretation of conscience” and insists that “the call must call silently” although not in the stillest hour but rather, in a “jolt and abrupt arousal.”^[30] The latter alludes to the possibility of embodiment however as Derrida says, and there is no sense of the flesh in Being and Time.^[31] In the final analysis, just as Dasein is estranged from the body, so too is it estranged from the emotions to which hearing is a channel. For this reason, the summons does not say anything.^[32] In other words, Heidegger is not existentially disposed to respond responsibly and therefore, rather than hear a definitive “love thy neighbour as thyself,” remains “open.”^[33] Elizabeth Hirsh detects this deficiency when she points out the significance of discourse for historical existence is undeveloped by Heidegger.^[34] It is “undeveloped” because he does not re-interpret the everyday way of being-in-the-world from the side of an auditory disposition that has responded to the call of being. Jacques Derrida echoes this assessment when he relates that the voice of the friend that Dasein carries within has a tonality “that one would call, in a language not very Heideggerian, affective.”^[35]

2.2 Heidegger’s Platonism

In his 1931/32 lectures, Heidegger is critical of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave for having anchored knowledge in the sense of sight and its light. “Metaphysical seeing” that purports to separate the knower from phenomenon reconstrued as objects is achieved through a graduated ascent from the cave to the light of the Good (metaphysics of constant presence). Thus, Heidegger considers Plato the founder of the Western tradition of metaphysics that culminates in Cartesianism and the technological enframing of humans and non-human beings.^[36] However, insofar as Heidegger prioritizes phenomenological seeing in his very reading of Plato, he extracts structural generalizations from the dramatic and historical contexts and thereby participates in “metaphysical seeing.”

In “Plato’s Doctrine of Truth,”^[37] Heidegger describes the stages by which the vision of the prisoners is reoriented from images to become assimilated to the light of “all knowing,” i.e., the light from which to see the visible forms themselves. He concludes Plato’s Allegory: “‘Unhiddenness’ now means: the unhidden always as what is accessible thanks to the idea’s ability to shine. But insofar as the access is necessarily carried out through ‘seeing,’ unhiddenness is yoked into a ‘relation’ with seeing, it becomes ‘relative’ to seeing.”^[38] The idea of the Good is the power of visibility that,^[39] “a light” to which sight is assimilated so as to reify beings and treat them independently of the processes in which they emerge. Heidegger thus considers Plato the founder of the Western metaphysical tradition. Is Heidegger’s thinking overly determined by a visual bias that similarly intensifies the light in which beings are unhidden? Does he interpret Plato from an attitudinal relation that is already “Platonic” as he understands it in “Plato’s Doctrine of Truth”? He called his own work a science.^[40] As mentioned, formal indications produce structural generalities,^[41] which in turn incline Heidegger’s interpretations to bypass contingent particulars and contexts.^[42] He echoes the terms of this attitude when he concisely describes the gist of Republic, Book VII as follows: “Socrates presents the story, Glaucon shows his awakening astonishment.”^[43] Rather than attend to Glaucon’s character, his relation to Socrates through Plato, and the relevance of Book VII to preceding and succeeding developments in the dialogue such as the system of virtues in Book IV,^[44] Glaucon’s voice is muted as if he were the ignorant student and Socrates, the wise school master.^[45] Along the same lines, despite his reticence toward classifications, Heidegger schematizes the ascent and descent in the Allegory into four stages.^[46] It stands otherwise with Paul Friedländer. As if to question Heidegger’s determination that Socrates the school master instructs the ignorant Glaucon, Friedländer writes, “The average mind expects that the more intelligent person can answer every question put to him. So Glaucon keeps urging Socrates to reveal his own views (dogmata) about the Good (506a et seq.). But Plato uses Socratic ignorance (506a) to resist this pressure.”^[47] This does not occur to Heidegger. His focus on that which is visible detracts from inquiring into both Socrates’ jocular play, wit, irony, and Glaucon’s comical exclamation at the height of the ascent, “Apollo! What divine transcendence!” (509c).^[48] Heidegger seems as indifferent to the drama of Plato’s dialogues as Aristotle. Indeed, Stanley Rosen argues that he “assimilates Plato into an Aristotelian doctrine of being qua being”^[49] and overlooks an important dimension of Plato’s philosophy that resonates with his own. However, the Good is compared by Plato to the sun that fosters the growth of a garden and thereby lets beings emerge of their own accord (phusis), in “Plato’s Doctrine of Truth” Heidegger bypasses this altogether.^[50] Similarly, according to Friedländer, although the idea of the Good is sighted at the height of the ascent, it remains invisible (and beyond the limits of language).^[51] If the Good is invisible and beyond language, then does it not retain the character of pre-Socratic aletheia (revealing-concealing)?^[52] Perhaps Plato’s alleged metaphysics is as Heraclitean as Heidegger’s method of interpretation is Platonic in temperament.

2.3 Phenomenological Seeing and Social Being

Heidegger is unaware of his visual bias and hence of the extent to which his phenomenological ontology falls under the shadow of Plato’s alleged metaphysical seeing. Given the characterization of the senses in Part 1, in which the affects are at stake, this yields predictable results for relations with others. He counterposes Dasein with its own social-being and therefore calls for a modification in existence so as to integrate them.^[53] However, this possibility is derailed by his tendency to bypass the role of hearing in such a transformation. After having defined the dilemma and Heidegger’s call for its resolution, the solutions of Lawrence Hatab and Taylor Carman are questioned for relying on “psychology” rather than an auditory way of being-in-the-world. Jacques Derrida shifts the analysis to “social-being” (friend within) and thereby brings to the fore precisely that which Heidegger requires to harmonize Dasein with itself.

On the one hand, Heidegger affirms a positive relation to “being-with” and by implication and affirms a community of human fellowship and solidarity. He states, “The they is an existential and belongs as a primordial phenomenon to the positive constitution of Da-sein”^[54] and “The disclosedness of the Mitda-sein of others which belongs to being-with means that the understanding of others already lies in the understanding of being of Da-sein because its being is being-with.”^[55] For Heidegger, “being-with-one-another” (in a shared world) is always already there ontologically and therefore before individuation. “Being-with-one-another” is a crucial structure of Dasein. On the other hand, he does not affirm the ontological priority of a shared world (being-with-one-another) and instead, disavows it. He writes, “inauthenticity is a kind of being-in-the-world which is completely taken in by the world and the Mitda-sein of the others in the they.” Dasein has fallen away from itself and become “prey to the world.”^[56] He continues and states that Dasein “plunges into groundless and nothingness of everyday.”^[57] This has been pointed out by both Daniel Dahlstrom and Taylor Carman. Dahlstrom writes, “Heidegger’s account of the way the crowd colors the various shades of daily encounters is masterful, but, in the wake of that account, being in the work-world and the public arena appears hardly realizable by – if not patently inconsistent with – being who one authentically is.”^[58] Heidegger “colors” the crowd with such characteristics as idle chatter, curiosity, and ambiguity, which in turn seems inconsistent with “being who one authentically is.”^[59] Non-relational authenticity predominates in Being and Time. Carman is similarly critical. He points out that there is no notion of “selfhood in others” in Heidegger’s thought, only “selfhood in oneself.”^[60] In support of their assessment, Heidegger specifies that being is undistorted insofar as Dasein is nonrelational.^[61] For him, an individuated existence is authentic, which implies that “the they” or “everyone” is but an impediment to an ontologically fundamental and primary mode of existence.

Carman and Dahlstrom wrestle with the crux of Heidegger’s dilemma yet not in terms of a phenomenology of the senses. In this regard, although Heidegger is critical of Plato for grounding metaphysics in a “production-ontology,” i.e., a looking toward the permanently present idea (whatness), Heidegger models his analysis of human facticity (thrownness) on the activity of the worker, rather than on the everyday activity of discussing matters of justice with friends. For him, philosophical reflection begins when the instrument in use breaks (ready-to-hand).^[62] However, despite this interruption in the activity of work, he does not attend to talk among workers and instead retains the future-directedness of the worker in his interpretation of Dasein. Franco Volpi writes:

The practical horizon of Heidegger’s concept of understanding is also clearly visible in the determination of the knowing that accompanies and guides understanding. Understanding has the structure not only of a projection, but also of a knowing, a ‘sight’ that orients the projection.^[63]

According to Volpi, Heidegger’s description of understanding as projective sight (Sicht) is modeled on Aristotle’s notion of praxis in Nicomachean Ethics VI. The practical comportment to which he is referring consists of sight orienting the understanding toward the future, which is not incidental to, but rather integral to techne.^[64] To the extent that understanding is prioritized by Heidegger in the erotic drive toward our own-most-possibility-to-be, the possibility of a conversation with others that might disclose the limits of our knowledge and prejudgments is minimized and instead, a subject-centered perspective on beings is intensified, Volpi suggests, by ontologizing a human standpoint on beings using Aristotle’s notion of praxis. In other words, it is not clear that by remaining within the purview of sight, indeed by exacerbating it with a drive of the self toward itself, that Heidegger ever transcends the work-world in which the existence of others as others is ignored.

The very discordance in Being and Time between Dasein and its social-being, between seeing and hearing attest to the problem. Heidegger’s visual bias separates him from affirming his own social-being with the result that he is divided against himself. However, he is cognizant of the issue and thus acknowledges that a modification in existence is called for. He writes, “When Dasein thus brings itself back from the they, the they-self is modified in an existentiell manner so that it becomes authentic being-one’s-self”;^[65] “Authentic being one’s self is not based on an exceptional state of the subject, a state detached from the they, but is an existentiell modification of the they as an essential existential” and^[66] “Authentic being-a-self shows itself to be an existentiell modification of the they which is to be defined existentially.”^[67] According to Heidegger, authentic being is not based on an exceptional state of the subject but instead, entails a modification of existence in which others are re-interpreted as a fundamental feature of Dasein.

In what does a modification of Dasein consists so as to fulfill the meaning of existence? Heidegger writes, “As the non-relational possibility, death individualizes, but only, as the possibility not-to-be-bypassed, in order to make Da-sein as being-with understand the potentialities-of-being of the others.”^[68] An encounter with our ownmost possibility for death, non-being, discloses the potentialities-of-being of the others. However, as Carman argues, the modification from being non-relational to being-relational is not developed by Heidegger.^[69] It is merely alluded to and thus invites a creative rethinking of his philosophy.^[70] He and Hatab have creatively rethought this space between non-relationality and the potential for relationality. According to Hatab, “attention to our finitude” opens us up to the suffering of others,^[71] i.e., compassion. In the midst of being overwhelmed by anxiety in the face of death, we identify with and feel for others and their circumstances. From this Hatab reasons that compassion, “is a basic ethical disposition (Befindlichkeit) or mood (Stimmung) that attunes us to the moral life in a way that mere knowledge, theories, or rules cannot.”^[72] He concludes, “compassion then, may be the deepest indication of mitsein.”^[73] Carman agrees. He explains that “the principal flaw in Heidegger’s account of selfhood” is “that it neglects the hermeneutical conditions underlying one’s capacity to understanding oneself as another an exercise in empathy and imagination that is arguably essential to our mundane ethical self-understanding.”^[74]

Carman and Hatab put forward plausible ways in which to transform human existence so as to harmonize Dasein with its own social-being. However, for Heidegger, empathy is derived from a way of being-in-the-world and hence cannot be included in an existential analysis of Dasein. Empathy like “a psychology, sociology, and anthropology, and ethics, or a politics” is not a condition of Dasein’s existence.^[75] Moreover, insofar as hearing and seeing denote different ways of being-in-the-world; nonrelational and relational, respectively, neither Hatab nor Carman is addressing the root of the problem; namely, a transformation in existence that is responsive to social-being. In this regard, Jacques Derrida sounds a unique tone.

Derrida focuses on the following passage from section 34 “Da-sein and Discourse: Language”: “Hearing even constitutes the primary and authentic openness of Da-sein for its ownmost possibility of being, as in hearing the voice of the friend whom every Da-sein carries with it.”^[76] In contrast to Carman and Hatab, Derrida recognizes that without “hearing,” there is no friend and therefore, no Dasein.^[77] The potentiality-for-being consists of the potential-to-be with others as oneself. And yet, as Derrida explains, Dasein carries the friend with it through its own voice and hence, “the friend itself” is obscured and does not say anything. The friend is merely “evoked” by Dasein.^[78] There is then a sense in which Dasein is estranged from itself. Derrida develops this possibility when he reasons that Kampf (war) belongs to the structure of Dasein “as it throws itself by anticipation toward death.”^[79] In other words, Dasein faces forward and fulfills its potential-to-be be in death, which is to say, by sacrificing itself to the community. Derrida finds validation for these inferences in the phrases with which Heidegger concludes the passage quoted above (SZ 163): negative modes of not-hearing, of opposition, of defying, and of turning away.^[80] For Derrida, these are intimations of war, struggle, tension, and conflict that culminates in sacrificial death. This conclusion is not incongruent with a phenomenology of the senses. As has been argued elsewhere,^[81] Heidegger’s visual bias inclines him to confuse that which is heard with a form seen in which case, he cannot but be at odds with himself and celebrate a life of continuous struggle that vacillates between life and death, being, and non-being.

In conclusion, due to the influence of metaphysical seeing on his phenomenological mode of perception and understanding, Heidegger does not modify Dasein’s existence through non-being and renders it receptive to others in an auditory disposition. Stephen Mulhall’s assessment of Heidegger follows:

But Heidegger does not just claim that falling is a general phenomenon – one to which any and every facet of human culture is always vulnerable. He also emphasizes that its ubiquity (and so the predominance of its effects in the philosophical tradition in particular) is not accidental. For if falling is internally related to Dasein’s absorption in the ‘they,’ it must be just as much a part of Dasein’s ontological structure as the they-self: falling is not a specific ontic state of Dasein, but ‘a definite existential characteristic of Dasein itself’. (BT, 38: 220)^[82]

According to Mulhall, Heidegger’s belief that “the they” are inauthentic is tantamount to saying that Dasein is ontologically inauthentic because Dasein is being-with. Mulhall believes Heidegger confirms this very interpretation when he writes, “the fundamental ontological characteristics of [Dasein] are existentially, facticity, and Being-fallen.”^[83] Since Dasein is completely fallen, only a completely transcendent God (for Mulhall) can save it from internal conflict. This is not viable for Heidegger who insisted that philosophy is “a-theistic.”^[84] Nevertheless, Dahlstrom explains that for Heidegger, Christian theology consists “not so much in making theoretical assertions as in formally signaling the revelation and the transformation of the believer its understanding entails.”^[85] The source of the transformation is neither “God” nor Kierkegaard’s existential theology but rather in attunement and responsive receptivity to the ambient environment in which Dasein is always already immersed in an auditory disposition. This is clarified by way of Augustine’s conversion experience.