Existential analysis
from 1927 Being and Time
Describe a person not as an object with properties but through what they are involved in, what matters to them, and what they are moving towards.
- Active
- from 1927
- Where
- Marburg
- Also
- Daseinsanalytik
- Status
- In use
- Tradition
- Continental procedures
What it is
Existential analysis describes human existence in terms of structures rather than properties: being already thrown into a situation not chosen, being involved with things and people in ways that matter, and being always ahead of oneself in projects and possibilities.
The refusal at its centre is a refusal to treat a person as a thing with attributes. On this account you are not a substance that happens to have a job and a family; you are the involvement, and describing you as a thing with a list of features misses what is being described.
How it works
Describe what the person is involved in and how the things around them show up — as tools, as obstacles, as demands. Describe what they have been thrown into and did not choose. Describe what they are moving toward, including the possibilities they are avoiding. Look for where the description is being carried by what one does rather than by what this person does.
That last check is Heidegger's das Man, the anonymous everyone, and locating it is usually where the analysis becomes useful.
The moves, in order
- Describe the involvements and how things show up within them
- Describe what was not chosen and is nevertheless the starting point
- Describe what is being moved toward, and what is being avoided
- Identify where the account is carried by what one does
- Distinguish the possibilities that are genuinely this person's
The procedure
Proposition The decision is not between two jobs.
- Described as an object with preferences, the case is simple: two offers, compare salary, location, hours, and choose. Put that way it has been unresolved for five months, which suggests it is not the description.
- The involvements: in the current role the tools show up as familiar and the phone as an interruption; in the imagined role the same person describes equipment they have never used as exciting and the commute as time to think.
- What was not chosen: the trade was entered at sixteen because the yard was hiring, the town was where the family already was, and the reputation for reliability was built without anyone deciding to build it.
- What is being moved toward, and avoided: both offers are in the same trade. The possibility not on the list, mentioned twice in passing and never as an option, is not working in the trade at all.
- Where the account is carried by what one does: the reasons given for staying are all in that voice — you do not walk away at this age, people would think, that is not what someone with a mortgage does.
Therefore The decision has not moved in five months because it is being posed as a choice between two options within a life that was never chosen, and the possibility actually in question is not on the list.
No advice follows from this and none is meant to. What the analysis produces is a redescription in which the difficulty becomes visible, and the person deciding is the only one who can do anything with it.
What it is good for
Situations where a decision will not resolve because it has been framed as a comparison between options within an unexamined situation. Its most productive home is psychotherapy, where a whole tradition is built on it.
Where it fails
Nothing checks it. The description is offered, it either resonates or it does not, and there is no procedure for deciding between two incompatible existential analyses of the same person. In the wrong hands this is indistinguishable from an authoritative-sounding story imposed on someone.
The vocabulary also does real damage. Heidegger's invented German and its English calques — thrownness, being-toward-death, the they — make the analysis sound like a discovery when it is a redescription, and readers grant it authority the argument has not earned.
And the notion of authenticity that it moves toward is thinner than it looks. Heidegger resists saying what an authentic possibility is, which leaves the crucial evaluative term doing heavy work with no content.
Common misconceptions
That authenticity means being true to yourself in the ordinary sense. Heidegger's term is closer to owning your situation rather than having it lived for you by anonymous convention, and it says nothing about what you should then do.
Where it came from
Division One of Being and Time, 1927, intended as preparation for a question about being that Heidegger never got to and abandoned.
What became of it
Taken up by Sartre and Merleau-Ponty in France, and by Binswanger and Boss into psychiatry, where existential and Daseinsanalytic therapy remain practised.
Lasting influence
Existentialism as a movement, most of French philosophy after 1940, and a durable tradition in psychotherapy and psychiatry.
Why it still matters
Alive in therapeutic practice more than in philosophy departments.
Put another way
Describing a person by the paths worn across their ground rather than by measuring them.
Texts
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time
Division One is the analysis. Division Two turns to death and authenticity, and the planned third division was never written.
Where to start
Read Division One with a commentary. Dreyfus's is the standard and it is written for people who find the original impossible.
The surprising bit
The most practically fruitful application of a famously difficult book has been in clinical psychotherapy, a field Heidegger neither addressed nor anticipated.
In their own words
The they prescribes the kind of being of everydayness
Who held it
Ludwig Binswanger, Hubert Dreyfus
Connections
- Relies on
- The epoche
- Parallel to
- The hermeneutic circle
The verdict
A genuinely different way of describing a life, with no means of telling an illuminating description from an imposed one.