...consciousness of our own subjectivity,
— Joshs

It's not at all clear what this might be. — Banno

“As Sartre also once wrote, “pre-reflective consciousness is self-consciousness. It is this same notion of self which must be studied, for it defines the very being of consciousness” (Sartre 2003: 100). Indeed, as he points out in the chapter
“The self and the circuit of selfness” in Being and Nothingness, consciousness is by no means impersonal
when pre-reflectively lived through. Rather it is characterized by a “fundamental selfness” (Sartre 2003:
127). As I read Sartre, his proposal is that rather than starting with a preconceived notion of self, we should let our understanding of what it means to be a self arise out of our analysis of self-consciousness.
Put concisely, the proposal is to identify the self with the subject of experience, and to conceive of the subject, not as an independent, separable entity, but as the subjectivity of experience, which is then claimed to be something no experience can lack, neither metaphysically nor phenomenologically.

To use a formulation of Strawson’s, if experience exists, subjectivity exists, and that entails that subject-of­experience-hood exists (Strawson 2009: 419). On this construal, the self is something that is essentially present in each and every experience. It is present, not as a separately existing entity, i.e., as something that exists independently of, in separation from or in opposition to the stream of consciousness. Nor is it
given as an additional experiential object or as an extra experiential ingredient, as if there were a distinct self-quale, next to and in addition to the quale of the smell of burnt hay and roasted almonds.

No, the claim is that all experiences regardless of their object and regardless of their act-type (or attitudinal character) are necessarily subjective in the sense that they feel like something for someone. In virtue of their inherent reflexive self-consciousness, in virtue of their self-presentational character, they are not anonymous, but imbued with a fundamental subjectivity and first-personal character, and the proposal has been to identify this first-personal presence, this experiential for-me-ness, with what has been called the minimal self (Zahavi 2005, 2014). To deny the existence of this for-me-ness, to deny that we have a distinctly different acquaintance with our own experiential life than with the experiential life of others
(and vice versa), and that this difference obtains, not only when we introspect or reflect, but already in the very having of the experience, is to fail to recognize an essential aspect of experience.“

I have no argument with that.
— Janus

Me, neither. What about you, Joshs? It's just that even if the distinction between the in-self and the for-itself is a remnant of Kantian dualism, it might still be of some use. — Banno

In one sense , Heidegger may agree with you. He made a distinction between human Dasein and rocks. He said that inanimate objects were ‘devoid of world’. By this he meant that only human Dasein could be said to experience a world in terms of a present that was informed and guided by a past.

Meanwhile , we have the phenomenologist Dan Zahavi who makes a distinction between for-meness and relation to objects.

“Any convincing theory of consciousness has to respect the difference between our consciousness of an object, and our consciousness of our own subjectivity, and must be able to explain the distinction between intentionality, which is characterized by a difference between the subject and the object of experience, and self-awareness, which implies some form of identity.”(Zahavi 2004)

“Unless phenomenology were able to show that there is in fact a decisive and radical difference between the phenomenality of constituted objects and the phenomenality of constituting subjectivity, i.e., a radical difference between object-manifestation and self-manifestation, its entire project would be threatened.”

I think that for Heidegger we are absent to ourselves when we are completely identifying ourselves with the "things" or entities we are dealing with. That is, in "normal" everyday "falling" (Verfallenheit) we are basically absent to ourselves. But then we are in a danger to interpret ourselves as mere things or tools i.e. as something present-of-hand or ready-to-hand and not as an human historical existence. — waarala

I disagree. Average everydayness covers over the uncanniness and fundamental absencing of Dasein.

"Uncanniness is the fundamental kind of being-in-the-world, although it is covered over in everydayness. Tranquillized, familiar being-in-the-world is a mode of the uncanniness of Dasein, not the other way around. Not-being-at-home must be conceived existentially and ontologically as the more primordial phenomenon." "The publicness of the they suppresses everything unfamiliar"
"Even as covered over, the familiar is a mode of the unfamiliar.”


I agree with William McNeil’s analysis of Heideggerian ‘absence’ as the in-between of the ontological
difference, that is , the structure of temporality itself.

“…human beings are necessarily held in and drawn into this possibility. Their presence can only ever be a presence that has already been; their future presence will be a presence that will have been: with respect to the presence of what is present, they exist in an essential absence. And this is the possibility and necessity of their actions, of their existing futurally and, from out of what has been, bringing forth in their actions what has never yet been-of their being an origin that remains
indebted to a historical world as a world of others. In the concluding remarks of the course, Heidegger characterizes the occurrence of this held presence, of the moment of human existing and as the happening of an essential absence that is at once worldly, historical, and finite.”

“ Man is that inability to remain and is yet unable to leave his place. In projecting, the Da-sein in him constantly throws him into possibilities and thereby keeps him subjected to what is actual. In the occurrence of projection world is formed, i.e., in projecting something erupts and irrupts toward possibilities, thereby irrupting into what is actual as such, so as to experience itself as having irrupted as an actual being in the midst of what can now be manifest as beings. It is a being of a properly primordial kind, which has irrupted to that way of being which we call Da-sein, and to that being which we say exists, i.e., ex-sists, is an exiting from itself in the essence of its being, yet without abandoning itself.

“Thus thrown in this throw, man is a transition, transition as the fundamental essence of occurrence. Man is history, or better, history is man. Man is enraptured in this transition therefore essentially 'absent'. Absent in a fundamental sense-never simply at hand, but absent in his essence, in his essentially being away, removed into essential having been and future-essentially absencing and never at hand, yet existent in his essential absence. Transposed into the possible, he must constantly be mistaken concerning what is actual. And only because he is thus mistaken and transposed can he become seized by terror. And only where there is the perilousness of being seized by terror do we find the bliss of astonishment-being torn away in that wakeful manner that is the breath of all philosophizing.”( Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics)

being-in-itself is explicitly definable, while being-for-itself is a process of self-definition - or more clearly, we can set out explicitly what it is to be an igneous rock, but we can't set out explicitly what it is to be Wayfarer; and this is because what it is to be Wayfarer is in a state of flux as Wayfarer makes his way through the world. An igneous rock does not make itself in the way a person does. — Banno

Merleau-Ponty and many other phenomenologists critiqued Sartre’s distinction between the in-self and the for-itself as an unsustainable remnant of Kantian dualism .

if we throw out the subject/object distinction, and read it more as "awareness" or "openness" or "perception" or "apprehension" (words he prefers), then of course that's happening. Dasein is an activity, a being-in-the-world, a caring entity pressing into the future. Difficult to describe because we have so little language for it. — Xtrix

Awareness , apprehension and perception may be a bit too close to the passivity of subject-object oppositionality. I noticed that, surprisingly, he doesnt use the word ‘awareness’ a single time in Being and Time , openness is used only a handful of times, and he’s not too crazy about perception either. I think he loves terms like disclosure. thrownnes and projection because they get away from the idea of a subject over here staring at a pre-existing object over there.

Our secular age, with its scientism and capitalism is ultimately based on "naturalism" and "materialism," or even "physicalism." Two other -isms branch off from these: hedonism and consumerism. — Xtrix

Don’t forget Marxism, and its associated dialectical materialism.

Is the Heidegger 2010b his 1925 lectures? — waarala

Yes.It’s ‘Logic: The Question of Truth’(1925-26)

2) A conscious (thinking) subject contemplating objects ignores absence -- it ignores the fact that most of the time we are acting unconsciously, and that thinking itself (as philosophical or scientific thinking) is but one mode of human activity. — Xtrix

I agree in general with your points. I would just say about 2) that Heidegger doesn’t. accept the concept of consciousness. Dasein is not a consciousness.
The reason for this is that consciousness implies
self-reflexivity and sel-affection on the part of the subject. To be a conscious subject is to reflect back on the previous moment of awareness without this reflection altering and transforming the immediately prior self. For Heidegger we are never conscious to ourselves , because reflection is transformation. So absence for Heidegger makes its way into the heart of experiencing every moment, in that the self is never present to itself as consciousness, self-reflexivity and self-awareness. We are fundamentally absent to ourselves.

As far as ‘thinking’ , Heidegger seems to use it in an idiosyncratic way to cover any and all sorts of experiencing.

But it seems there are good Nazis, or perhaps that a certain Nazi is, shall we say, "beyond good and evil." — Ciceronianus

I think this is the crux of the matter. I believe that all of us, including Heidegger and Hitler, are beyond good and evil. That is to say, following Nietzsche, I interpret others’ actions from a psychological rather than a moralistic perspective. For me, understanding personal behavior in the context of sociological, historical and psychological influences isnt just a question of locating mitigating factors, but constitutes the central explanatory system for dealing with others. I mentioned your legal background because we all tend to choose a profession that reflects our ways of understanding the world. I chose psychology and philosophy as consonant with my belief system. It seems to me that you view personal behavior primarily from the vantage of character and individual responsibility and choice. I’m not saying you don’t take social, historical and psychological
factors into consideration, but I suspect that you see them as only peripheral to what you see as the central consideration, which is that of personal moral choice.
So Heidegger represents for you a morally flawed personality , and any wider sociological analysis is seen by you as excuse making.

, I don't see stasis as being an "illusion" any more than change is. Yes, things change. Things also stay the same. We talk about matter changing forms but never being created or destroyed, so matter itself doesn't change...and all of that jazz. Again, we don't want to get caught in the restriction of "being and becoming," where we associated being with permanence. But we also don't want to say being is becoming — Xtrix

I want to get back to what you said in your OP. You asked the question ‘What is ‘isness’? I don’t know how comfortable you will be with this , but what if , in the aim of finding a point of focus, we agree to discuss being in terms of Heidegger’s analysis of the copula ‘is’?

What I have in mind specifically is his analysis of what he calls the statement in B&T. He refers to this as an extreme
modification of interpretation and of the present to hand.
He derives the ‘is’ from the ‘as’ structure, in which we take something as something. I consider the following analysis to inextricably link the ‘is’ to the ‘as’ , the ‘as’ to temporality, and temporality to being ( the ‘is’).

From my paper:

Heidegger explains that in taking something to be the case in a propositional judgement (for instance, S is P) , we are taking something as something within a wider context of pragmatic relevance. Making sense of something is an act that always has the ‘as' structure , as Heidegger tells us, but this structure of relevanting is covered over and flattened down in causal models.

“The most immediate state of affairs is, in fact, that we simply see and take things as they are: board, bench, house, policeman. Yes, of course. However, this taking is always a taking within the context of dealing-with something, and therefore is always a taking-as, but in such a way that the as-character does not become explicit in the act.” (Heidegger 2010b)

In taking something AS something , we are not simply associating two externally related entities in relation to each other and with reference to a more encompassing causal framework. If a cognition or intention is merely about something , then it functions as external binding, coordinating and relating between two objectively present participants.

Heidegger(2010b) says:

“If the phenomenon of the "as" is covered over and above all veiled in its existential origin from the hermeneutical "as," Aristotle's phenomenological point of departure disintegrates to the analysis of logos in an external "theory of judgment," according to which judgment is a binding or separating of representations and concepts. Thus binding and separating can be further formalized to mean a "relating." Logistically, the judgment is dissolved into a system of "coordinations," it becomes the object of "calculation," but not a theme of ontological interpretation.""If the kind of being of the terms of the relation is understood without differentiation as merely objectively present things, then the relation shows itself as the objectively present conformity of two objectively present things.”

The ‘is' connecting S with P is not a causal copula, but a transformative relevanting altering in one gesture both the S and the P. In Gendlin's terms, the ‘as' enacts a crossing of past and present such that both are already affected and changed by the other in this ‘occurring into implying' ( context of dealing with something). When we take something as something, we have already projected out from a totality of relevance such as to render what is presenting itself to us as familiar and recognizable in some fashion. But in this act of disclosure, we only have this totality of relevance by changing it. This is why Heidegger says that in the process of interpreting what is projectively familiar to us, the ‘as' structure takes apart what it puts together in a kind of crossing.

Heidegger (2010) offers:

“What is to be got at phenomenally with the formal structures of "binding" and "separating," more precisely, with the unity of the two, is the phenomenon of "something as something...In accordance with this structure, something is understood with regard to something else, it is taken together with it, so that this confrontation that understands, interprets, and articulates, at the same time takes apart what has been put together.

In experiencing something as something, Dasein comes back to its having been from its future, which is to say, it interprets a global context of relevance via the ‘as' structure. In so doing, it “takes apart' the relation between what it encounters and a previous instance of it by coming back to the previous instance from a fresh context of relevance. Seeing something as something makes sense of what is encountered in a new way, on the basis of a newly implied totality of relevance. This taking apart of what has been put together brings us back to the structure of temporality.

“Because my being is such that I am out ahead of myself, I must, in order to understand something I encounter, come back from this being-out-ahead to the thing I encounter. Here we can already see an immanent structure of direct understanding qua as-structured comportment, and on closer analysis it turns out to be time. And this being-ahead-of-myself as a returning is a peculiar kind of movement that time itself constantly makes, if I may put it this way.”(Heidegger 2010b)

The returning from a totality of relevance in the act of understanding something constitutes temporality not as a present object happening IN time but as temporalization. The past, present and future don't operate for Heidegger as sequential modes which mark distinct states of objects. They interpenetrate each other so completely that they together form a single unitary event of occurrence.

If what the term "idealism" says, amounts to the understanding that Being can never be explained by entities but is already that which is 'transcendental' for every entity, then idealism affords the only correct possibility for a philosophical problematic. If so, Aristotle was no less an idealist than Kant." B&T p. 208 — waarala

there are essential characteristics of phenomena which make possible in the first place to access something and observe it and make generalizations. Instead of Kantian categorical, logical functions ordering the natural world there are essential characteristics of the human historical existence and which can differ from case or phenomena to other. They don't make any rigid system (for logical deductions). For Heidegger to intuite essentialities behind facticities or what is empirically given is a genuine philosophical way to address these phenomena — waarala

These essential characteristics of historical
existence are nothing other than the historicality of existence itself. I wouldnt say the essentialities are intuited ‘behind’ facticities. - Rather they are ahead of or beyond themselves. Dasein comes to itself
from out of the world. Essence as being , is temporalizarion , history, existence, becoming.

There is not made generalizations from the observed data and then theoretically deduced something but instead there are essential characteristics of phenomena which make possible in the first place to access something and observe it and make generalizations. — waarala

If essence is becoming , temporalization, then an essential characteristic , as a condition of possibility , means nothing other than an analysis of something in terms of a moving structure of pragmatic relevance. There are not generalizations made from data, but instead there is a totality of relevance being changed by what occurs into it from the world. So the ‘accessing’ and ‘observing’ of the world via its incorporation into a
totality of relevance is already modified and changed by what this prior totality discloses. This is the essence of being as temporality.


“Because the Dasein is constituted by being-in-the-world, it is a being which in its being is out beyond itself. The epekeina belongs to the Dasein's own most peculiar structure of being. This transcending does not only and not primarily mean a self-relating of a subject to an object; rather, transcendence means to understand oneself from a world. The Dasein is as such out beyond itself. Only a being to whose ontological constitution transcendence belongs has the possibility of being anything like a self. Transcendence is even the presupposition for the Dasein's having the character of a self. The selfhood of the Dasein is founded on its transcendence, and the Dasein is not first an ego-self which then oversteps something or other. The “toward-itself” and the “out-from-itself” are implicit in the concept of selfhood. What exists as a self can do so only as a transcendent being. This selfhood, founded on transcendence, the possible toward-itself and out-from-itself, is the presupposition for the way the Dasein factically has various possibilities of being its own and of losing itself….The Dasein does not exist at first in some mysterious way so as then to accomplish the step beyond itself to others or to extant things. Existence, instead, always already means to step beyond or, better, having stepped beyond."(Basic Problems of Phenomenology).

I don’t see “becoming of time” meaning anything. Time— temporality— is, essentially, us. It’s dasein’s being as ecstatic openness. Things persist and change, sure, but first they’re here, they are.
— Xtrix

This sounds like the view of time Heidegger is critiquing
— Joshs

It's not a view of time. Persistence and becoming both presuppose being. They are also thought of in terms of the present-at-hand, as things that persist or change "in time," as I think you agree, and this itself rests on an interpretation of time which is also present-at-hand. When looked at phenomenologically, this doesn't appear to be dasein's state of being, for the most part. Dasein seems much more engaged with and coping with a world than seeing things as objects that persist or "become." This distinction is an old one, of course, but itself rests on a present-at-hand mode of being -- beginning with Plato's characterization of Parmenides and Heraclitus.

We’ ‘are’ only as being changed.
— Joshs

We are only as being temporal. He's not saying we're embodied change, he's saying we're embodied time/temporality. He is not equating temporality with change. How can we think or "know" change in the first place? We first have to "be" before we can even comprehend change.
— Xtrix

Let me see if I’m understanding what you mean when you say persistence and becoming both presuppose being.

Are you arguing that we need both the concept of persistence and that of becoming in order to understand being?

This is the way I understand persistence and ‘isness’.
If we say that something appears just for a moment and then vanishes, we still have to assume that it occupies that moment of time, and we can assume that this space of occupation has a duration, even if it is only infinitesimal. In theory, then , we can measure this very brief persistence as a certain number of milliseconds of duration. But what is it we are doing when we count a duration? A quantifiable, mathematizable nature presupposes the kind of time which consists of self-presences transitioning from future to present to past in sequential movement (existing ‘in’ time).

What does it imply to make a time measurement, to state that it takes certain amount of time or for some process to unfold? A time calculation counts identical instances of a meaning whose sense is kept fixed during the counting . To count is to count continuously changing instances OF something that holds itself as self-identical through a duration or extension.

I am arguing that Heidegger is deconstructing the idea of self-identical persistence.
It is widely assumed that there can be no notion of change or becoming without this idea of at least a momentary self-presence. Something would seem to have to be there before we can then say that it changes or disappeared. But Heidegger and also Gendlin disagree.
If change is modeled on motion , the notion isn’t really change in the sense of the generation of novelty, because all one really has here is the repetition of a previous scheme, an identical self-infolding.
Heidegger asks, why does change require the notion of something sitting still as itself for a moment? Instead of founding the idea of change on sequences of things that sit still for a moment, (which is really founding change on bits of stasis that we cobble together), why not recognize that there are no things that sit still. Why not found the illusion of stasis on change , rather than the other way around? Why is it not enough to point to a crossing between past and present as the ‘now’? And by ‘now’ I mean a hinge, a crossing , an edge. The now is a complex now , what Husserl
calls stretched or specious, not a simple presence , but a transit, an act , a ‘from this to that’. From this vantage, any ‘presence’ is split within itself , it is internally articulated as a change from this to that. But the prior , ,this’ must also be understood as a hinge, and so on.

What’s the difference between being in general and the totality of being of dasein?
— Joshs

What do you mean by the totality of being of dasein? Remember the title: being and time. If dasein is essentially time, and is the entity that interprets being and questions being, then we begin to understand why in the West being was interpreted as "presence." But Heidegger doesn't himself offer an interpretation of being, only the human being. — Xtrix

Heidegger didn’t consider Dasein as just a human being, which is an empirical concept . He wasn’t anthropomorphizing Dasein. Dasein is priori to the thinking of human beings or living things. In this he was following Husserl.


Im adding a snippet from a paper I’m working on which compares Gendlin’s model of time with Heidegger’s. It deals with your question: how can we understand change and becoming without beginning from objects which are present for a least a moment ? Gendlin’s ‘occurring into implying’ is comparable to Heidegger’s notion of the ‘is’.

“In various writings, Gendlin distinguishes his Heideggerian account of time from phenomenologically-influenced causal interactionist readings such as those of Gallagher , Varela, Fuchs and Sheets-Johnstone (See Gendlin 2008, 2012).

“I propose an expanded model of time. Time does not consist only of nows.” Linear time consists merely of positions on an observer's time line. The positions are supposed to be external and independent of what happens. Linear time is an empty frame.““ The linear unit model of successive self-identical times is generated from the more intricate model of time.”

“If only what appears exists, then what exists is “external,” in front of us, other than us, as if alone from us, over-there from here. To “exist” came to mean to appear to us. The very word for things became (and still is) “phenomena.” This is the old subject-object puzzle: what exists can only be a known-by. The metaphysical puzzle comes here only if we first assume that what
exists must have a self identical shape in space and time. Then there seems to be nothing but formed forms imposed on — nothing“

As Gendlin(1997b) argues,

‘The continuity of time cannot first be made by things next to each other, because sucha continuity is passive; each bit IS alone, and must depend on some other continuity to relate it to what is next to it...”(p.71).

In embodied cognitive models, interaction spreads in a reciprocally causal fashion from point to point, whereas for Gendlin, each point somehow implies each other point; each part of a meaning organization somehow “knows about”, belongs to and depends intrinsically on each other part. And this happens before a part can simply be said to exist in itself(even if just for an instant).
What kind of odd understanding concerning the interface between identity and relation could justify Gendlin's insistence that the inter-affection between parts of a psychological organization precedes the existence of individual entities?

Gendlin(1997b) explains:

In the old model one assumes that there must first be "it" as one unit, separate from how its effects in turn affect it.. In the process we are looking at there is no separate "it," no linear cause-effect sequence with "it" coming before its effects determine what happens. So there is something odd here, about the time sequence. How can "it" be already affected by affecting something, If it did not do the affecting before it is in turn affected?...With the old assumption of fixed units that retain their identity, one assumes a division between it, and its effects on others. (This "it" might be a part, a process, or a difference made.) In the old model it is only later, that the difference made to other units can in turn affect "it." (p.40)

Addressing causally interaffecting organizational models, Gendlin explains:

If one assumes separate events, processes, or systems, one must then add their co-ordinations as one finds them, as if unexpectedly...“Inter-affecting" and"coordination" are words that bring the old
assumption of a simple multiplicity, things that exist as themselves and are only then also related. So we need a phrase that does not make sense in that old way. Let us call the pattern we have been formulating "original inter-affecting". This makes sense only if one grasps that "they" inter-affect each other before they are a they(p.22).

Gendlin digs beneath such causative approaches to locate a more fundamental notion of interaction. “This ‘interaction’ is prior to two separate things that would first meet in order to interact. I call it ‘interaction first’.” ‘Interaction first’ functions as what Gendlin(2008) calls
implying into occurring, and in this way carrying forward a previous change.

“Here we chose to put occurring and implying first in our model, and we will derive perception and objects from these. We put occurring into implying (carrying forward) at the start, and these will inhere in all the other terms. Space, time, and perception are derivative from them. The body and its environment as one interaction is prior in our model. From this we can derive separate
individual things and units.”

“Implying has (makes, brings, is .....) time, but not only the linear merely positional time. Though far from clear (we are only beginning), we want the sequence to define time for us. We did not begin with a clear notion of time. Let us say that the relation between occurring and implying
generates time, rather than saying that life processes go on in time. (The latter statement would involve an already assumed time.)”(Process Model)

Implying is not an occurring that will happen. It is not an occurring-not-yet. It does not occupy a different time-position than the occurring. Rather, one implying encompasses all three linear time positions, and does not occupy an additional linear time position of its own. (See A Process Model, IVB. This is a more intricate model of time. It includes a kind of “future” and a kind of “past” that are not linear positions. This time model can be reduced back to the liner model by considering just
occurring-occurring-occurring as if it were cut off from implying.”

Comparing Gendlin’s model of temporality with Heidegger’s, we see that for Heidegger also , the past,
present and future don’t operate as sequential modes which mark distinct states of objects. They interpenetrate each other so completely that they together form a single unitary event of occurrence.

“Because my being is such that I am out ahead of myself, I must, in order to understand something I encounter, come back from this being-out-ahead to the thing I encounter. Here we can already see an immanent structure of direct understanding qua as-structured comportment, and on closer analysis it turns
out to be time. And this being-ahead-of-myself as a returning is a peculiar kind of movement that time
itself constantly makes, if I may put it this way.”(Heidegger 2010b)

The returning from a totality of relevance in the act of understanding something constitutes temporality not as a present object happening IN time but a temporalization.

“Temporalizing does not mean a "succession" of the ecstasies. The future is not later than the having-been, and the having-been is not earlier than the present. “Dasein "occurs out of its future"."Da-sein, as existing, always already comes toward itself, that is, is futural in its being in general." Having-been arises from the future in such a way that the future that has-been (or better, is
in the process of having-been) releases the present from itself. We call the unified phenomenon of the future that makes present in the process of having been temporality.”(Heidegger 2010)

Gendlin(1997b) echoes Heidegger’s unification of the components of time.

“The future that is present now is not a time-position, not what will be past later. The future that is here now is the implying that is here now. The past is not an earlier position but the now implicitly functioning past.”“......the past functions to "interpret" the present,...the past is changed by so functioning. This needs to be put even more strongly: The past functions not as itself, but as already changed by what it functions in”(p.37)

The being of dasein is temporality, which interprets being. Not being in general. — Xtrix

What’s the difference between being in general and the totality of being of dasein?

The distinction between ‘beings’ and ‘things’ is a fundamental ontological distinction. If you lose sight of that then what ontological distinctions are there? — Wayfarer

Past , present and future.

I don’t see “becoming of time” meaning anything. Time— temporality— is, essentially, us. It’s dasein’s being as ecstatic openness. Things persist and change, sure, but first they’re here, they are. — Xtrix

This sounds like the view of time Heidegger is critiquing, that events occur ‘in’ time , that things come into presence and ‘ occupy’ time and then disappear.

“What does it mean to be "in time"? This "being-in-time" is very familiar to us from the way it is represented in natural science. In natural science all processes of nature are calculated as processes which happen "in time." Everyday common sense also finds processes and things
enduring "in time," persisting and disappearing "in time." When we talk about "being-in-time," everything depends on the interpretation of this "in." In order to see this more clearly, we ask simply if the glass on the table in front of me is in time or not. In any case, the glass is already
present-at-hand and remains there even when I do not look at it. How long it has been there and how long it will remain are of no importance. If it is already present-at-hand and remains so in the future, then that means that it continues through a certain time and thus is "in" it. Any kind of continuation obviously has to do with time.”(Zollikon)

“Time is making present according to Aristotle, (the present at hand) and in so doing is a counting
of time as now, now, now. And thus time shows itself for the vulgar understanding as a succession of constantly
"objectively present" nows that pass away and arrive at the same time.”

Temporality for Heidegger isnt simply ‘us’ as ecstatic openness. It is what is happening to us NOW as a future ( a totality of relevance) which is in the process of having been. The structure of temporality is transition as unified occurrence. ‘We’ ‘are’ only as being changed.

“Temporalizing does not mean a "succession" of the ecstasies. The future is not later than the having-been, and the having-been is not earlier than the present. “Dasein "occurs out of its future"."Da-sein, as existing, always already comes toward itself, that is, is futural in its being in general." Having-been arises from the future in such a way that the future that has-been (or better, is in the process of having-been) releases the present from itself. We call the unified phenomenon of the future that makes present in the process of having been temporality.”(Heidegger 2010)

I should add that your reading is consistent with a number of Heidegger scholars, including Dreyfus. Mine is consonant with Derrida’s reading.

Heidegger is not offering an interpretation himself, for example that being = time. — Xtrix

He certainly is, if you are referring to the ontological understanding of the being of Dasein.

“We defined the being of Da-sein as care. Its ontological meaning is temporality.”
“ The task of the foregoing considerations was to interpret the primor­dial totality of factical Da-sein with regard to its possibilities of authentic and inauthentic existing and to do so existentially and ontologically in terms of its very basis. Temporality revealed itself as this basis and thus as the meaning of being of care. Thus what the preparatory existential ana­lytic of Da-sein contributed prior to setting forth temporality has now been taken back into temporality as the primordial structure of the total­ity of being of Da-sein.”

I wouldn't say that to exist means becoming and not stasis. In that case we're in the being/becoming distinction again, only taking the side of the latter. But Heidegger rejects that as a false choice, as you know. Not sure what you're saying here. — Xtrix

In the quote below, Heidegger equates occurrence with existing , and existing with transition( elsewhere he uses the word ‘becoming’), and transition with the structure of temporality. Where does stasis fit in here? If stasis is equivalent to objectively present , enduring , subsisting , self-identical, inhering, then he is determining stasis as an inadequate way to think about existing. Becoming isnt at one pole and stasis at the other, and neither is becoming the sequential movement of things becoming present ( stasis) in time and then passing away. Rather , the becoming of time is a single unified occurrence that is future, present and having been in the same moment. There is no room for stasis or objective presence here.

“Thus thrown in this throw, man is a transition, transition as the fundamental essence of occurrence...Man is enraptured in this transition and therefore essentially 'absent'. Absent in a fundamental sense-never simply at hand, but absent in his essence, in his essentially being away, removed into essential having been and future-essentially absencing and never at hand, yet existent in his essential absence. Transposed into the possible, he must constantly be mistaken concerning what is actual. And only because he is thus mistaken and transposed can he become seized by terror. And only where there is the perilousness of being seized by terror do we find the bliss of astonishment-being torn away in that wakeful manner that is the breath of all philosophizing.”(Heidegger 1995)

Dreyfus, if I remember right, sees Heidegger as a realist in the sense that he acknowledges the mind-independent existence of things. It is quite a while since I read Being and Time, Blattner, Dreyfus and others so it's hard for me to judge now without going back to the text (which I don't have time to do); do you see the Heidegger of B & T as an idealist? — Janus

You’re right about Dreyfus’s interpretation, but Dreyfus has gone out of fashion as a reader of Husserl and Heidegger. I suppose I’d could call Heidegger an idealist in the sense that I don’t believe that things have an indeed et existence for him. But neither do contents of the world conform to faculties of mind ala Kant. Instead , world and self mutually form each other , which makes for an odd kind of idealism.

The concern with authenticity and being-towards-death are more aligned with the existentialist dimensions of Heidegger's thought, I'd say. — Janus

Being-towards-death certainly reminds many of Kierkegaard, but the feature of Heidegger’s analysis of death that I find valuable doesn’t rest on death as the end of life but death as the end of every moment of time. That is, the finite nature of temporality , the fact that each néw moment of time is the death of a previous sense of meaning. So I link death directly to the nothing , angst and the uncanny.

I think there has to be a distinction between the verbs 'to exist' and 'to be'. So 'existent' or 'phenomenon' doesn't have precisely the same meaning as 'being'. Furthermore, living beings embody the dynamic nature of being - the fact that it's a verb - more so than minerals and inorganic substances. — Wayfarer

There isn’t such a distinction for Heidegger. To exist is movement and becoming, not static presence to self.

Heidegger distinguishes between the being of things in the world and the being of dasein. We enjoy an additional dimension of being beyond that of a present at hand or ready to hand being. All existents are, by common definition or usage, beings. — Janus

I don’t know that the being of things has any status for Heidegger except as a distorted and flattened modification of the ‘as’ structure’ of disclosure. Objective presence is deconstructed over and over in Being and Time. The being of things as presence implies extension, duration and self-identity. Heidegger shows such thinking to be in need of clarification.

Just between you and me, authenticity and death are two foci of analysis in Being and Time that lead to confusion and, as far I’m concerned, can be removed without losing much from the heart of the work.
— Joshs

I don't agree with this. I think those ideas are central to Being and Time. They may lead to confusion in some readers, but they certainly don't inevitably. — Janus

If we remove Heidegger’s analysis of authenticity, for me what’s left are the most remarkable features of his model, including his analysis of mood , interpretation and pragmatic ready to hand dealings with the world , being-with-others, the origin of empirical objectivity and formal logic. What the shift to the mode of authenticity does is take this pragmatic engagement and make it thoroughly self-reflexive. We become concerned with Being as whole
rather than beings. But as Heidegger says, only on rare occasions do we think authentically.

But I haven't referred to Heidi's anti-Semitism. You brought that up. Why defend him to me for his bigotry? — Ciceronianus

What is there to gain from a historical-biographical analysis? The basic facts of his history can be obtained easily enough. I don't think he was a villain in any case. — Ciceronianus

Like hell you don’t. At least be honest about it. You may be right , so why the bullshit posturing?

He could be everything you say he is . In fact, he has to be everything you say he is because you haven’t given us anything beyond the reader’s digest version of the nazi villain Heidegger , and you’ve admitted it.

Maybe a lawyer has nothing to gain from a historical-biographical analysis of a defendant. After all, their job is to create a simple overwhelmingly negative caricature of the person on trial, leaving out all ambiguities and redeeming features. You have done exactly that. Contributing to your cartoonish presentation is your choice to portray me as ‘defending’ Heidegger. Let me make something clear. I am not invested in protecting Heidegger from character assasination. I am perfectly open to the possibility that he had no redeeming personal qualities.
My beef with you really isnt about Heidegger. It’s about your laziness This isnt a trial, it’s a philosophy forum. Don’t give us the cartoonishly one-sided argument of a prosecutor. Play devils advocate . Do a little research. Banno quoted a biographer of Heidegger who displays the even handedness that’s lacking from your comments.
He doesn’t portray Heidegger in a positive light , but as a philosopher he understands his work and the historical context well enough to go beyond your superficial condemnation.

I wonder how his Jewish best friends would feel about him if they had the opportunity to read his Black Notebooks. — Ciceronianus

What about his Jewish enemies? Eugene Gendlin was a Viennese Jew who , at age 13 , just barely made it out of Austria alive in 1939. As a philosopher and psychologist at the University of Chicago, he avoided reading Heidegger for years because of his political activities.
After finally reading and embracing aspects of his philosophy, Gendlin wrote a remarkable analysis of the historical context of Heidegger’s actions. He didn’t excuse Heidegger or explain away what he did , but , like another famous Jewish philosopher who suffered at the hands of the Nazis, Emmanuel Levinas, he showed Heidegger’s faults to be symptomatic of a weakness endemic to European thinking. Rather than conveniently indulging in a pose of moral superiority, patting himself on the back for his righteousness, he looked beyond the individual to a climate of thinking common not just to the Nazis but to those who opposed them.

Here’s the first part of Gendlin’s article , plus the last paragraph:

“Jung offers deep and indispensable insights. I did not like knowing that Jung had said: "Hitler is the embodiment of the German spirit." The Nazis knew his views. Records show that they considered sending for Jung to help Rudolph Hess with his mental trouble.

Similarly, I had not wanted to know that Dostoevsky hated Jews, Germans, and Poles. He gave influential speeches in favor of the Panslavic movement. That movement was a direct cause of the Russian-French alliance and the World War.

What I heard of Heidegger's Nazi views made me decide not to read him at all. I read him when I was almost 40 years old. Then I realized that Heidegger's thought was already in mine, from my reading of so many others who had learned from him.

With these three we are forced to wonder: Must we not mistrust their seemingly deep insights? How could we want these insights for ourselves, if they came out of experience so insensitive to moral ugliness? Perhaps it might not matter if the insights were less deep. But they open into what is most precious in human nature and life. The depth is beyond question. The insights are genuine.

So one attempts to break out of the dilemma on the other side: Is there a way Nazism or hatred of other peoples might be not so bad? Could it have seemed different at the time? No chance of that, either. I am a Jewish refugee from Vienna, a lucky one to whom nothing very bad happened. I remember what 1938 looked like, not only to a Jew, but to others. I remember the conflicts it made in people. They could not help knowing which instincts were which. Many writers and ordinary people had no difficulty seeing the events for what they were, at the time.

So we return to question the insights again. But by now they are among our own deepest insights. We go back and forth: Nothing gives way on either side.

Did these men simply make mistakes? We can forgive mistakes. A human individual can develop far beyond others, but surely only on one or two dimensions. No one can be great in more than a few ways. And Heidegger did write of his "mistakes" in his application to be allowed to teach again at Freiburg (1946). He also distanced himself from the Nazi party already in 1934, long before most Germans. I have no difficulty understanding any person's mistake, and less difficulty if someone is highly developed in other ways. No human can have every kind of strength and judgement. On a personal level there is really no problem.

Why he was so silent about the mistake is also more than personal. It is the silence of a whole generation. I will return to this silence.

The problem is not about him, personally, at all. I pose a problem for us. The problem is, why his kind of philosophy---our kind of philosophy---fails to protect against this "mistake." That is the philosophical question.

His philosophy allowed for this mistake. It is therefore not just the personal accident. There is an inherent, systematic connection. These deep insights permit inhuman, racist views. To find the systematic connection, we must look exactly where these views---our views---are deepest, most precious, and not false but true. What was lacking at that most true point?

Something very important was lacking at the deepest point. We don't notice the lack, because when we read these writings today, we assume and add what is lacking.

I became an American when I was 13. As a child I had not belonged in, or identified with, Austria. I had been alienated in some confused and inarticulate way. I found I could really be an American, and I am one.

But, some European peculiarities remain from before. At the Heidegger Circle I laugh silently to myself, when other Americans discuss and share Heidegger's view that to be human is to dwell historically as a people on a soil. How do my fellow Americans manage to dwell with Heidegger on German soil?

My colleagues read this in a universalized way. For us, in the Heidegger Circle, the human is the same everywhere in this respect, and equally valuable. Humans are culturally particularized, certainly, but this particularization is itself universal. Humans are one species. They are all culturally particular. This universal assertion holds across us all, and we see no problem.

Indeed, after 1945 Heidegger writes of the dangers of technological reason on a "planetary" level. But it is reason, which is thus planetary---the same universal reason he says he had always attacked. (Spiegel Interview.) Heidegger's planetary view differs from our more recent understanding of human universality. The difference has not been much written about, so there are no familiar phrases for it. For Heidegger there is no common human nature which is then also particularized and altered in history. There is no human nature that lasts through change by history. There is only the historical particular, no human nature.

Humans eat and sleep differently in different cultures. They arrange different sexual rituals, build different "nests," and raise their young differently. In an animal species the members do all this in the same way. Humans are not even a species. So, at least, it seemed to those thinkers who entered into what is most deeply human.

To them, the deepest and most prized aspect of humans was the cultural and historical particular.

In our generation we easily and conveniently universalize the particularization. Not Heidegger. For him, what is most valuable is the necessarily particular indwelling in one people's history and language, on its land, and not another's. We change it without noticing, to read: any indwelling in any people's history is this most highly valued aspect.

**************************
Last paragraph:

It is partly the influence of his work in us, which now makes us unable to grasp how he could have failed to sense the nonrational universality of humans. Today, in Chicago, when we look at Louis Sullivan's buildings, the ones that created modern architecture, we wonder why he used so much granite. Why didn't he use just steel and windows?

To understand may be to forgive, but it is certainly not to excuse. Without pretending to lighten the horror, we need to understand why that tradition of thought also brought
horror. Only so can we think through what we draw from our immediate past. Only then can we recover the other past, right behind that one. We need both, to articulate our own, non-rational universalization of human depth.“

Complete paper:

http://previous.focusing.org/gendlin/docs/gol_2018.html

And it may be partially accurate , although I suspect O’Brien has an axe to grind. You’ll find an inverse correlation between enthusiasm for Heidegger’s philosophy and hostility and disdain toward him as a person. If you think his philosophy is revolutionary, you are less inclined to accuse him of a Messianic Complex, and you will view his disappointment with more sympathy. ‘Petty’ and ‘spiteful’ likely say as much about O’Brien as they do Heidegger.

Being for Heidegger (Of Being and Time) is the meaningful presence of something. Ontical aspect here is that there is something concretely, there is some concrete being, and ontological aspect is the Being of that being, which gives sense to that being so that it can manifest as something. Being is the transcendental dimension that makes particular empirical beings possible — waarala

This sounds a lot more like Kant than Heidegger (Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind). Understood most primordially, there is no presence of something objective, no empirical being. The transcendental basis of Being is not an idealism ala Kant but the transcendent as transit and transformation.

Temporality is a kind of a pure becoming or nothingness only that the moment of present produces certain stability or persistence or actual beingness to it. Selfhood is not possible without the presence. If temporality were pure becoming there would be no presence at all, only past and future? — waarala

There is no moment of presence, alongside a moment of future and past. These together form one moment of occurrence. Selfhood for Heidegger isnt presence to self but a relation of change. Temporality is pure becoming, not because there is no present, but because present, past and future belong to the same moment, as movement.

So how does examining 'being' accomplish so much? Can you provide an applied example? — Tom Storm

Heidegger is trying to offer an alternative to causal
logics. You can answer our own question by turning it around. How does formal and empirically causal logic accomplish so much? I can’t offer an applied example of Heidegger’s new logic without first introducing you to the ideas from which to derive an application. As far as I’m concerned , there is no shortcut to reading Being and Time, although you could attempt secondary sources.

And who can forget this perfectly unambiguous statement: The Fuhrer himself and he alone is German reality and its law, today and for the future — Ciceronianus

Have you read any biographies of Heidegger? It sure doesn’t sound like it from your superficial attacks on him. Even though I’m quite invested in his philosophy, I don’t mind even the most bellicose condemnations of his political activities. But yours just aren’t interesting. If you’re going to prove to us he’s the villain you believe him to be , put a little effort into it. Everybody knows the basics facts , his declaration of allegiance to Hitler , etc. that you’re simply regurgitating.
But where are the quotes from those who knew him best , especially his Jewish friends? What makes his politics interesting are such details as the fact that he wasn’t particularly anti-semitic compared to the larger culture. Wittgenstein, a Jew, was at least as anti-semitic as Heidegger.
If you can’t participate in a philosophy forum on the philosophy of Heidegger , at least give us a substantive historical-biographical analysis.

That's a bit private-language, isn't it - that there is a what it is like for me for that thing to be a pencil... or some such nonsense.

As if he were to say that the private meaning of "Pencil" changes as the pencil goes blunt with use.

But there isn't a private meaning. There's only your asking to borrow my sharpener — Banno

Wittgenstein did not make use always personal. Quite the opposite. Use is inherently social. — Banno

I don’t think Anthony would agree with the distinction you’re making between the private and the public for Wittgenstein, as witnessed by his discussion of the personal experience of pain in the absence of others. (One can show to oneself). Neither would a number of other Wittgenstein interpreters. For instance, Phil Hutchinson says:

“ “In short, Baker's post -1990 ‘position'—expounded throughout BWM—is that Wittgenstein's method is radically therapeutic: therapeutic in that the aim is to relieve mental cramps brought about by being faced with a seemingly intractable philosophical problem; radically so in that how this aim is achieved is person relative, occasion sensitive and context dependent.”

The "as" structure is... seeing that x is p is seeing x as p, an intent. That intent is embedded in way of life, it's only understandable as a whole.

That gets me to about your fourth paragraph, and then it turns into mud. — Banno

This is where it gets very tricky, and where Heidegger’s definition of temporality is crucial. When we see something as something, we are, as you say, drawing from what we already know about why we care about it , what we are using it for , how it fits into our current goals and concerns. All that background informs what it is for us. But in encountering it right now, in incorporating it into our activities right now , we are also modifying that totality of relevance ( that interconnected web of background concerns and goals). That past is changed by what it functions in. This is the strange approach to time that Heidegger has.

“Temporalizing does not mean a "succession" of the ecstasies. The future is not later than the having-been, and the having-been is not earlier than the present. “Dasein "occurs out of its future"."Da-sein, as existing, always already comes toward itself, that is, is futural in its being in general." Having-been arises from the future in such a way that the future that has-been (or better, is in the process of having-been) releases the present from itself. We call the unified phenomenon of the future that makes present in the process of having been temporality.”(Heidegger 2010)

Gendlin(1997b) echoes Heidegger's view.

“The future that is present now is not a time-position, not what will be past later. The future that is here now is the implying that is here now. The past is not an earlier position but the now implicitly functioning past.”“......the past functions to "interpret" the present,...the past is changed by so functioning. This needs to be put even more strongly: The past functions not as itself, but as already changed by what it functions in”(p.37 )

So when we encounter something as something, this new item is already familiar to us because we link it to a pre-existing totality of relevance. At the same time , the very encounter with it alters that totality of relevance. So the past is changed by the present that it defines.

Wittgenstein is saying something similar by making use always person and context-centered. Background knowledge of rules, grammar and criteria dont simply remain as themselves when they come into play in a language game. They are freshly determined by contextual interactions( the past is changed by what it functions in).

"Conclusion. Granted that the question of being-as-such is the overarching question of metaphysics, the question of the nothing proves to be one that encompasses the whole of metaphysics. The question of the nothing also pervades the whole of metaphysics insofar as it forces us to confront the problem of the origin of negation – that is, to finally decide whether the domination of metaphysics by “logic” is legitimate. Putting the questioner in question. The nothing ‘’gives” being." — frank

I think I can clarify the role of ‘the nothing’ for Heidegger. In Being and Time he explains that he doesn’t mean it as a complete absence of sense or meaning , but rather as a comportment toward experience in which one no longer is interested in particular beings. So in this mode of relating , one discloses ‘no things’, no beings. Instead, authentic Dasein has bigger fish to fry, Being as a whole.

“In what Angst is about, the "it is nothing and nowhere" becomes manifest. The recalcitrance of the innerworldly nothing and nowhere means phenomenally that what Angst is about is the world as such. The utter insignificance which makes itself known in the nothing and nowhere does not signify the absence of world, but means that inner­worldly beings in themselves are so completely unimportant that, on the basis of this insignificance of what is innerworldly, the world is all that obtrudes itself in its worldliness.”

“ What Angst is anxious for is being-in-the-world itself. In Angst, the things at hand in the surrounding world sink away, and so do innerworldly beings in general. The "world" can offer nothing more, nor can the Mitda-sein of others. Thus Angst takes away from Da­sein the possibility of understanding itself, falling prey, in terms of the "world" and the public way of being interpreted. It throws Da-sein back upon that for which it is anxious, its authentic potentiality-for-being-in-the-world.”

The "is" in the sentence "What is being" is apparently referring to something,
— Xtrix — Banno

Let’s go over this a little. What does Heidegger say about the propositional form ‘S is P’? He says this is derived from the more general way in which we make sense of anything. Heidegger explains that in taking something to be the case in a propositional judgement (for instance, S is P) , we are taking something as something within a wider context of pragmatic relevance. Making sense of something is an act that always has the ‘as' structure , as Heidegger tells us, but this structure of relevanting is covered over and flattened down in causal models.

“The most immediate state of affairs is, in fact, that we simply see and take things as they are: board, bench, house, policeman. Yes, of course. However, this taking is always a taking within the context of dealing-with something, and therefore is always a taking-as, but in such a way that the as-character does not become explicit in the act.” (Heidegger 2010b).

This pragmatic approach should remind you of Wittgenstein. In taking something AS something , we are not simply associating two externally related entities in relation to each other. If a cognition or intention is merely about something , then it functions as external binding, coordinating and relating between two objectively present participants. This is the presumption behind formal
logic , but Heidegger says it misses the larger pragmatic context.

“If the phenomenon of the "as" is covered over and above all veiled in its existential origin from the hermeneutical "as," Aristotle's phenomenological point of departure disintegrates to the analysis of logos in an external "theory of judgment," according to which judgment is a binding or separating of representations and concepts. Thus binding and separating can be further formalized to mean a "relating." Logistically, the judgment is dissolved into a system of "coordinations," it becomes the object of "calculation," but not a theme of ontological interpretation.""If the kind of being of the terms of the relation is understood without differentiation as merely objectively present things, then the relation shows itself as the objectively present conformity of two objectively present things.“

Heidegger (2010) offers:

“What is to be got at phenomenally with the formal structures of "binding" and "separating," more precisely, with the unity of the two, is the phenomenon of "something as something...In accordance with this structure, something is understood with regard to something else, it is taken together with it, so that this confrontation that understands, interprets, and articulates, at the same time takes apart what has been put together.”

In experiencing something as something, Dasein comes back to its having been from its future, which is to say, it interprets a global context of relevance via the ‘as' structure. In so doing, it “takes apart' the relation between what it encounters and a previous instance of it by coming back to the previous instance from a fresh context of relevance. Seeing something as something makes sense of what is encountered in a new way, on the basis of a newly implied totality of relevance. This taking apart of what has been put together brings us back to the structure of temporality.

“Because my being is such that I am out ahead of myself, I must, in order to understand something I encounter, come back from this being-out-ahead to the thing I encounter. Here we can already see an immanent structure of direct understanding qua as-structured comportment, and on closer analysis it turns out to be time. And this being-ahead-of-myself as a returning is a peculiar kind of movement that time itself constantly makes, if I may put it this way.”(Heidegger 2010b)

There's that germ of something not unlike Wittgenstein's showing in aletheia - unconcealment. But on top of that is so much apparent bullshit - using the word in it's technical sense - authenticity, angst, death... and anti-semitism. — Banno

Just between you and me, authenticity and death are two foci of analysis in Being and Time that lead to confusion and, as far I’m concerned, can be removed without losing much from the heart of the work. Derrida , whose reading of Heidegger is my favorite, said as much. Angst is kind of an ingenious idea, encapsulating the essence of becoming in terms of its uncanniness.

What? Wouldn't such an theory have to presuppose a logic, a grammar in which it might be set out? — Banno

It could. Or it could try to burrow deeper , and find a way to build self-reflexivity into its terms, so that rather than setting out a formal scheme, it can enact what makes particular schemes and grammars possible without itself being any one of these. Wittgenstein said you could only show. Heidegger tried to tell

They all slept with him? — Banno

Only figuratively, afaik

Hmmm. Indeed. Logic doesn't seem to go with phenomenology of your sort. — Banno

Haven’t you thought about the origins of logic? Wouldnt a primordial theory of Being have to begin with the conditions of possibility for logic rather than simply presuppose it as a starting point?

He must have had some redeeming features, since he apparently appealed to Arendt. P — Banno

And Adorno, Derrida, Merleau-Ponty, Tillich, Gadamer, Rorty, Wittgenstein, Jonas, Ortega Y Gassett, Barth and Levinas , to name a few.

That's what Hegel said. — frank

Heidegger writes a lot about Hegel , indicating his debt to him.

Heidegger does not treat being as a thing; but there is no point trying to explain that to someone who has not read his work.
— Janus

But that is what is done in the OP:
The "is" in this sentence is apparently referring to being, but being is presupposed with when using the "is." So it's almost like asking "What is 'is-ness'?"
— Xtrix
...so at the least you might critique the OP for misrepresenting Heidegger. — Banno

To give Xtrix the benefit of the doubt, I think he is alluding to the fact that Heidegger begins Being and Time by asking the question ‘What is Is-ness’?
His answer is that terms like ‘Is’ , Being’ and existence don’t point originarily to such notions as presence, identity, inherence and thingness , but show these concepts to be derivative of a more fundamental structure of becoming.

In general the pragmatists do a better job, I think, though Joshs will very much disagree. — Manuel

If one were to label Wittgenstein a pragmatist , I think he is a different kind of pragmatist than Peirce, James or Dewey( for one thing, he moved away from
empiricism and they haven’t).
I believe that understanding the later Wittgenstein brings one fairly close to what Heidegger was aiming at.

The point being that yes, he often complicates things without needing to do so. — Manuel

There are plenty of philosophers I think this is true of , but not the Heidegger of Being and Time( I feel differently about his later work). I look for clarify, systematization and unity in a philosophy and I find them in Being and Time. You will not find them there to the extent that traditional preconceptions turn it into a muddle.