Remarks on Thomas Sheehan’s ‘Making Sense of Heidegger: A Paradigm Shift’

Katherine Withy

Remarks on Thomas Sheehan’s ‘Making Sense of Heidegger: A Paradigm Shift’

Katherine Withy
Georgetown University

There are at least two kinds of mistakes that are very easy to make when trying to make sense of Heidegger. One is becoming fluent in Heidegger’s language without adequately understanding what it means. The other is putting Heidegger into familiar language without first spending enough time grappling with his texts. One of the great virtues of Tom Sheehan’s work is that it avoids both of these mistakes. Because of this, Tom’s work has been enormously helpful to me in my own attempts to be a faithful yet clear interpreter of Heidegger.

But it is perhaps because of this influence that I do not – I am sorry, or pleased, to report – find myself scandalised by Sheehan’s ‘scandalous’ reading of Heidegger. Perhaps I am an insufficiently ‘pious’ reader of Heidegger (or an excessively pious reader of Sheehan!), or perhaps the paradigm shift that Sheehan proposes has already occurred or is already occurring in my generation of Heidegger readers. But even if this is true, there remains much to be clarified about what Heidegger was on about.

Sheehan has argued that Heidegger’s primary concern is not being (Sein) but the ultimate ground or condition of possibility of being (‘Anwesenlassen’), where being is understood as meaningful presence (Anwesen). According to Sheehan, Heidegger pursues this ground of meaningfulness all the way back to human thrownness, or what he later calls ‘Ereignis’. This reading takes us a long way in consolidating Heidegger’s various vocabularies and in illuminating his project, especially as one that is continuous across his career. The challenge that we confront now, as I understand it, is to make sure that we have not simply replaced one vague or misunderstood term with another. We need to know what we are talking about when we talk about Ereignis or thrownness.

‘Thrownness’ (Geworfenheit) is the more familiar term for most, because of its prominence in Sein und Zeit. But it seems to me that we do not yet have a consensus on what even this term refers to. So let me say something about what I think ‘thrownness’ must mean on a reading like Sheehan’s, and draw out the consequences for our understanding of Angst and of our ultimate for-the-sake-of-which.

First, we can say what thrownness does not mean, at least primarily: thrownness is not the givenness to sense-making of things to be made intelligible. It is also not our receptivity to such givens. In addition, thrownness is not our situatedness in a particular historical context, culture or language. If this is right, then we have to stop talking about thrownness as the embeddedness or receptivity of sense-making. So what are we to say?

We know that thrownness has both a whence and a whither, a from which and a to which. What we are thrown into is being a sense-maker – as Sheehan says, we are ‘condemned’ to making things meaningful.¹ We are inevitably ‘pan-hermeneutical’.² We are necessarily what we are; we are stuck with making sense of things.

¹ Thomas Sheehan, ‘Making Sense of Heidegger: A Paradigm Shift’, in Proceedings of the Forty-Sixth Annual Meeting of the Heidegger Circle, p.239. Note that in Sein und Zeit Heidegger almost always specifies that into which we are thrown as some version of ‘being a sense-maker’, saying that we thrown into, or delivered over to: our own being(SZ42,189), ourselves (in our being (SZ144, 192, 383), the entity that we are (SZ284), the there (SZ135, 148, 284, 297), existence (SZ276), our ability to be (SZ383), projection (SZ145), or being-guilty (SZ291). We are even thrown into our thrownness (SZ148, 396).
² Sheehan, ibid., p.224.

We come into this from or on the basis of an opaque ground – what Heidegger calls the ‘obscure whence’ of thrownness. As Sheehan points out, we cannot make sense of our thrown openness without presupposing it, and in this sense cannot get out from behind it.³ It is thus a ‘mystery’. As Heidegger puts it, “‘In itself’ it is quite incomprehensible why entities are to be uncovered, why truth and Dasein must be” (SZ228). This makes thrownness a particular kind of finitude. It is not the dependence of being receptive or embedded, but an intrinsic finitude that belongs to sense-making’s reflexive operation: sense-making is driven to, but cannot, make full sense of itself.

In sum, then: to be thrown is (as Sheehan says) to be inevitably, and mysteriously, panhermeneutical.

My second point – about Angst – follows from this. We might think that Angst reveals the resistance of given things to our interpretations of them, or that it exposes the limitations of our language, the contingency of practical identities, or the ungroundedness of our culturally specific ways of understanding. All of these are breakdowns that reveal the fallibility or fragility of the sense that things make. But if Angst is the pure experience of thrownness within a life, then it cannot be (just?) this kind of breakdown. It must (also?) be an experience of our inexplicable condemnation to making meaningful.

On this reading, Angst does include an encounter with the unintelligible, with something that exceeds or resists sense-making – but this is the obscure whence of thrownness, the selfunintelligibility of sense-making in its ground. Put differently, Angst arises when the drive to make sense of things is directed towards itself and frustrated in its attempt to grasp its ground. Angst is an encounter with the mystery at the origin of sense-making and so of meaningfulness.

Thus Angst is the same as the ‘astonishing’ experience of the fact that we are, which is astonishing because it is beyond our ken. This astonishing fact is the fact that sense-making is, and so that things make sense, or that there are things (in the sense of meaningfully present things) at all. So asking the question ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ is the same as the encounter with the obscure whence of thrownness, and this is what happens in Angst.

This brings me to my final point. Part of the story I have been telling is that being inevitably pan-hermeneutical is not merely a condition, but something like a drive: we are driven to make sense of things. I have captured this by describing sense-making in erotic terms (echoing both Plato and Freud), but we could put it in Aristotelian terms: we are oriented towards fulfilling our essence and reaching our telos as sense-makers. This is to say (as Sheehan does) that the ultimate for-the-sake-of-which of human life is meaning or sense.⁴

In addition to being erotic, we have seen that we are finite. This means that we will always be ‘on the way’ to full intelligibility – always in process, always becoming, always possible. So, in sum, we can say that sense-making is finite and erotic – or, as Sheehan puts it, thrown into the meaning process.⁵

³ Sheehan, ibid., p.237. ⁴ Thomas Sheehan, ‘Astonishing! Things Make Sense!’, in Gatherings: The Heidegger Circle Annual, vol. 1, 2011, pp. 3, 20.
⁵ Sheehan, ibid., p.20.

But Sheehan also puts this point by saying that we are thrown into “having to constantly become in order to stay alive”.⁶ This formulation suggests that life (presumably understood nonnaturalistically) is the ultimate for-the-sake-of-which, and that ‘possibility’ and ‘becoming’ are to be glossed in terms of the Aristotelian notions of movement and life rather than in the contemporary Kantian language of inhabiting social roles and holding ourselves to norms. Talk of practical identities might illuminate how sense-making happens ‘on the ground’, but to understand how sense-making happens at all, we need to turn to Aristotle and ask what it is to be alive.

This would indeed be a paradigm shift, for one of the central ways in which readers of Heidegger enter contemporary philosophical conversations is through this ‘neo-Kantian’ lens. We also do it through our talk of the embeddedness and situatedness of human life and knowing, and through an understanding of Angst as similar to Sartrean nausea or as the antecedent to a Kuhnian paradigm shift. I take Sheehan’s point to be that if we stop here, we miss Heidegger’s project entirely. This may not scandalise all of us, and yet many of us still talk about possibility, thrownness and Angst in these ways. So perhaps Sheehan’s proposal should scandalise us more than it does.

⁶ Sheehan, ‘Making Sense of Heidegger…’, op.cit., p.235; ‘Astonishing!...’, op. cit., pp. 3, 20.

Katherine Withy - Remarks on Thomas Sheehan’s ‘Making Sense of Heidegger: A Paradigm Shift’