Although he doesn't get into specific "do's and dont's" he tries to make alive philosophical thinking such that thinking in those ways becomes normal for us — Gregory

I do think you would find some specifics in "What is Called Thinking?" and "Language, Poetry, and Thought", particularly as to what thought is and should be. Because Thinking is a lecture, it allows him to draw out a subject as he would want us to be drawn towards the world.

he moves away from a focus on an (abstract) endpoint ( — Antony Nickles

I don’t see an abstract endpoint in Being and Time. Thinking Being fundamentally, primordially, is not stepping out of time and history , or beginning before history. Thinking Being thematic , making it a problem rather than a given , is historical through and through. This means that my thinking of Being exists. To exist is to surpass, to be is to be in transition.” “ex-sists, is an exiting from itself in the essence of its being, yet without abandoning itself.” Being isn’t a concept in history. It is history itself as historicizing.

pointing to more practical (ethical) ways of being, such as: our letting being draw us in, listening before jumping to naming/judging, and other approaches which may make the dead word alive again in our voice, our self able to be uncompleted. — Antony Nickles

What happens when we don’t let being draw us in, when we don’t listen before jumping to naming/ judging? Is the word dead then? Heidegger isn’t arguing that we break away from the pragmatic relation of heedful relevance the world has for us under such circumstances. It is impossible to do because a totality of relevance is always already implied and intrinsic to any experience, regardless of our mode of comportment toward the world. So it’s not a question of experiencing the world pragmatically or not , but of whether or not we are aware of this always underlying mattering.

“ Acts of directly taking something, having something, dealing with it “as something,” are so original that trying to understand anything without employing the “as” requires (if it's possible at all) a peculiar inversion of the natural order. Understanding something without the “as”—in a pure sensation, for example—can be carried out only “reductively,” by “pulling back” from an as-structured experience. And we must say: far from being primordial, we have to designate it as an artificially worked-up act. Most important, such an experience is per se possible only as the privation of an as-structured experience. It occurs only within an as-structured experience and by prescinding from the “as”— which is the same as admitting that as-structured experience is primary, since it is what one must first of all prescind from."(Logic,The Question)

maybe he misses the mark early on in taking Being as a replacement for a static self, as Marx does (or a reading of Marx does) in skipping over the revelation that we are produced (by means we may not control), to a belief that we can get to a point of being unproduced, rather than choosing or going against the means- — Antony Nickles

But we are not simply produced. Dasein projects a world that it can be surprised by. We don’t simply interject or internalize from an outside. Our own past projects a future that our present occurs into. What occurs occurs into an implying. This is what give Dasein its pragmatic self-intimacy , it’s ‘for the sake of- in order to’ .

maybe Heidegger's way to ethics is bringing historicity (temporality?) to our ontology to fight against dogmatism, — Antony Nickles

I agree here

the act, the fight, the considering--not "falling prey", getting "caught up", "cut off"--is of greater consequence than the knowledge of Being; that the explicit hides the implicit, as well as that intuition must become "tuition" — Antony Nickles

But the knowledge of being is always an existing , a transit , We always already understand Being in that we always are projecting ourselves into a future. Understanding is this forehaving that is affected by what it projects itself into.

I will read those and start a thread about them sometime. Thanks.

Heidegger ends Being and Time with Hegel, and he was also influenced by Schelling. The latter wrote "If one understands (by intellectual intuition) an intuition that corresponds to the content of the subject-object, one can speak of an intellectual intuition, not of the subject, but of reason itself... Reason is there the intuiting and the intuited." Heidegger knows that there is something preconceptual (transcendent) which Dasein has a dialectic with in reasoning that is always mysterious but allows us to reason. Schelling says, "What is the beginning of all thinking is not thinking and what comes before all power also comes before all thought! And certainly, Being, which anticipates all power, we must also call being that is un-thinkable-in-advance as preceding all thinking." Schelling and Rosmini (who wrote in Italy in that time) said God was the ground of Being, Thought, and Time in man, as Hegel seemed to agree with (panentheism?), although Heidegger didn't think this a necessary conclusion (as far as I can see)

Heidegger on God:
GA 73.2: 991

2. Of Being

The lightest of the slight is beyng.

The most entity-like of entities is God.

In beyng, the distinction between beings and being (in the sense of beingness) comes into its own.

Being means: presence.

Seyn never lets itself be identified with God. It also always remains doubtful whether the proposition, God is the most being-like of beings, speaks of God according to divinity.
As the most being-like, God is the first cause and the last goal of all beings. God is represented as the most being-like of beings, and so God essentially occurs out of beyng. Nevertheless, God is not primordially linked to beyng; because beyng occurs essentially not as cause and never as ground.”

I'm going to have to analyze that latter, since I'm going to lunch and that quotation doesn't make sense to me

The key phrase is “beyng occurs essentially not as cause and never as ground.”

I don't see pantheism, panentheism, and theism as contradictory. They are aspects of the same thing. However, Hegel thought an Absolute Idea logically uses syllogisms to "make" (or rather, is) phenomena and our consciousness. Hegel agreed we have will, but thought logic was the ground of everything. I don't think Hegel thought God was a person. Heidegger seems to share this agnosticism. But what bothered all these German thinkers was that they couldn't figure themselves out. It's as if they felt someone else was behind the scenes in their private noumena with them, but knew not who it was

. I don't think Hegel thought God was a person. Heidegger seems to share this agnosticism. — Gregory

I don’t see Heidegger as an agnostic. It seems to me that God is only a coherent concept if it implies the good, and the good is only coherent if it can be located as a a stably self-identical sense. But I don’t see that the good is any particular sense, feeling, meaning that continues to be itself over time for Heidegger. The basis of Being is difference , difference destroys the ability to locate the ‘good’ as a coherent notion whose meaning we can locate, and this makes the notion of god , whether as a person or force or energy or inner self , incoherent.

just as a hammer can be thought of as a wooden stick with a metal piece on the end of it, weighing a certain amount and of a certain dimension or having other properties, but isn't thought of such when we're absorbed in the activity of hammering, likewise the world isn't simply "material."
— Xtrix

Does that mean for Heidegger the world is more than material, that it is at least material? Is a material thing something that has a countable duration i. time and an extension in space? Does Heidegger accept this description and only want to remind us that the subjective aspect contributes such notions as usefulness to what an object is? How are duration and extension derived? Do they presuppose some basis on which to measure duration and extension, that is , some feature that remains constant and self-identical such that it can be counted? — Joshs

I don't know what "at least material" means.

Heidegger is saying that our present-at-hand mode of being is very different from our more absorbed coping with the world, as exemplified by equipment (like hammers). When we're doing philosophy and science, we see things as objects -- mass, material, weight, dimensions, time as a number line, etc. When we're engaged with activities, or are in "flow," we're not in the same mode and so not seeing things in the same way. The hammer no longer is a material object with properties, it's something for hammering. That's not to say it's not also material, but that materialism is privative.

I don’t see Heidegger as an agnostic. It seems to me that God is only a coherent concept if it implies the good, and the good is only coherent if it can be located as a a stably self-identical sense. But I don’t see that the good is any particular sense, feeling, meaning that continues to be itself over time for Heidegger. The basis of Being is difference , difference destroys the ability to locate the ‘good’ as a coherent notion whose meaning we can locate, and this makes the notion of god , whether as a person or force or energy or inner self , incoherent. — Joshs

Sartre says something like this near the beginning of Being and Nothingness. I think we all, however, struggle with some sense of someone else telling us what to do with our conscience, something foreign to us in our own consciousness. So I don't think we should numb this out but instead be open to all possibilities about what the truth of reality might be

Another point I have learned from Heidegger is that a thing's potentiality *is* it's actuality. If a chair can be burned it is because it is actually a chair. Heidegger puts the brakes on this encountering of beings by saying we don't know what Being means (at least not fully) however

↪Antony Nickles. "pointing to more practical (ethical) ways of being, such as: our letting being draw us in, listening before jumping to naming/judging, and other approaches which may make the dead word alive again in our voice, our self able to be uncompleted.
— Antony Nickles
— Joshs

But the knowledge of being is always an existing , a transit , We always already understand Being in that we always are projecting ourselves into a future. Understanding is this forehaving that is affected by what it projects itself into. — Joshs

"It is impossible to do because a totality of relevance is always already implied and intrinsic to any experience, regardless of our mode of comportment toward the world. So it’s not a question of experiencing the world pragmatically or not , but of whether or not we are aware of this always underlying mattering. — Joshs

It seems here it doesn't matter the way we conduct ourselves (or the ways there are to conduct ourselves) as long as we are aware (present). But I think we are in the weeds already when trying to pin down Being either as knowledge or source, etc.

Heidegger knows that there is something preconceptual (transcendent) which Dasein has a dialectic with in reasoning that is always mysterious but allows us to reason. — Gregory

Being means: presence. — Joshs

It's as if they felt someone else was behind the scenes in their private noumena with them, but knew not who it was. — Gregory

Once Being becomes the source, the answer, the object, than we are lost in a struggle on metaphysics' terms. That's not to say Heidegger doesn't have something important to say, as does Socrates, though they're better when they leave the question unanswered (universally).

@Xtrix"just as a hammer can be thought of as a wooden stick with a metal piece on the end of it, weighing a certain amount and of a certain dimension or having other properties, but isn't thought of such when we're absorbed in the activity of hammering, likewise the world isn't simply "material."

This is where Wittgenstein helps in showing that knowledge and practice are different for every different thing. There's the criteria by which we identify a hammer, and what counts as hammering (that it might be done with a rock). These concepts and their criteria are not material but are also not preconceptual--simply unexamined, unconscious, forgotten. In each case it does not take presence, but remembering, making explicit; in each case, in each context.

So are there 3 positions?

1) being is source

2) being is knowledge

3) being is something else

So are there 3 positions?

1) being is source

2) being is knowledge

3) being is something else — Gregory

Let me give another brief synopsis of Heidegger, if you don't mind. Bear with me, because it's slightly longer than normal, but it'll give perhaps an overview that'll help flush out the details. This is my reading, of course, so please push me for citations and details if you're skeptical about any particular claim.

Being can be interpreted in many ways. That's exactly the point. It has been interpreted as phusis, as idea, as ousia, as substantia, as God, as nature, and so on...it has also been called a "vapor" (Nietzsche) and an empty word. All of which are true in their own way.

What Heidegger does is try to show that this spectrum of interpretations in the Western world, beginning with the Greeks, shares something in common -- as one would expect, given that we're all not only part of the "Western" tradition (I like to think along the lines of languages, in this case Proto-Indo-European) but also human beings, and so can't help but do some things similarly.

That common feature, according to Heidegger, is presence. Derrida calls this the "metaphysics of presence," and he's right.

Presence, of course, implies "time" -- the present. But if we take "time" to mean what the tradition has meant by it (starting with Aristotle), or even how it's "ordinarily" understood, we're right back on to the wrong track. Why? Because the perspective which guided Aristotle's interpretation of time was itself rooted in presence -- it was itself one part of this tradition. Therefore, time itself also gets interpreted as something present -- as a series or sequence of "now-points."

This is why Heidegger tries to come up with a new understanding of time as "ecstatic openness," as temporality. To do so, he also has to re-interpret the human being; not as rational animal, which the tradition holds, but as dasein -- a "here," a "clearing," etc. Why? Because we're the one's raising this question to begin with. We're the ones interpreting "being" at all, or are even concerned with it. So it's important to understand ourselves, and if it turns out that this "clearing" is the point where everything gets interpreted from, then we cannot use the traditional perspective to understand it. If we did, we'd simply be using the traditional concepts of "nature," "material," "substance," "time," "reason," "animal," etc.

So we need to re-interpret the human being, ourselves, without bringing in concepts from the past. This is why he calls us "dasein," why he calls time "temporality," and all the other weird terms he uses. It's also why he emphasizes phenomenology as the method for analysis. When he analyzes dasein, he goes through various layers until he arrives at the interpretation of us as this embodied time -- temporality.

Dasein, who cares about, understands, and interprets being = being-in-the-world = care = temporality. The "da," the here, is an openness which in later Heidegger becomes more aligned with "aletheia," the concept of un-concealment or disclosure. He'll say that this is what Parmenides was talking about in the famous "thinking and being are one" fragment -- that he really is saying "apprehension and being are one," apprehension/perceiving in the sense of un-concealment. But the point remains.

How any of this is relevant to the real world, to our lives, to politics, etc., is another question. :lol:

Note: I wrote this before seeing Xtrix’s comment. It sounds like we’re on the same page.

It seems here it doesn't matter the way we conduct ourselves (or the ways there are to conduct ourselves) as long as we are aware (present). But I think we are in the weeds already when trying to pin down Being either as knowledge or source, etc. — Antony Nickles

Being means: presence.
— Joshs — Antony Nickles

In this quote, Heidegger is distinguishing between the traditional understanding of Being and Beyng. In the mid 1930’s he began using this term ‘Beyng’ to further differentiate Dasein from being as presence.

“beyng occurs essentially not as cause and never as ground.”

Awareness for Heidegger isnt presence , it’s transit, an absencing, precisely a not being present to oneself. It is thrownness.

“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 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.”

Derrida declared his indebtedness to Heidegger for inspiring his project of the deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence.Early on in Being and Time Heidegger takes on the genealogical history of being as presence in Western philosophy.

“ Mathematical knowledge is regarded as the one way of apprehending beings which can always be certain of the secure possession of the being of the beings which it apprehends. Whatever has the kind of being adequate to the being accessible in mathematical knowledge is in the true sense. This being is what always is what it is. Thus what can be shown to have the character of constantly remaining, as remanens capax mutationem, constitutes the true being of beings which can be experienced in the world. What enduringly remains truly is. This is the sort of thing that mathematics knows. What mathematics makes accessible in beings constitutes their being. Thus the being of the "world" is, so to speak, dictated to it in terms of a definite idea of being which is embedded in the concept of substantiality and in terms of an idea of knowledge which cognizes beings in this way. Descartes does not allow the kind of being of innerworldly beings to present itself, but rather prescribes to the world, so to speak, its "true" being on the basis of an idea of being (being = constant objective presence) the source of which has not been revealed and the justification of which has not been demonstrated. Thus it is not primarily his dependence upon a science, mathematics, which just happens to be especially esteemed, that determines his
ontology of the world, rather his ontology is determined by a basic ontological orientation toward being as constant objective presence, which mathematical knowledge is exceptionally well suited to grasp.* In this way Descartes explicitly switches over philosophically from the development of traditional ontology to modem mathematical physics and its transcendental
foundations.” (Being and Time)

So are there 3 positions? — Gregory

I meant those as examples, not as alternative explanation. The specific type of answer is not the problem, it is the desire for a particular, certain, or universal answer of Being or the explanation of the structure of Being that is the same type of obsession which led to metaphysical solutions like Plato (and that Kant was trying to get around). The appearance and the real turned into the appearing doesn't get us out of the original desire, which Heidegger falls away from only in the later work.

“ Mathematical knowledge is regarded as the one way of apprehending beings which can always be certain of the secure possession of the being of the beings which it apprehends. Whatever has the kind of being adequate to the being accessible in mathematical knowledge is in the true sense. This being is what always is what it is. Thus what can be shown to have the character of constantly remaining, as remanens capax mutationem, constitutes the true being of beings which can be experienced in the world. What enduringly remains truly is. This is the sort of thing that mathematics knows. What mathematics makes accessible in beings constitutes their being. Thus the being of the "world" is, so to speak, dictated to it in terms of a definite idea of being which is embedded in the concept of substantiality and in terms of an idea of knowledge which cognizes beings in this way. Descartes does not allow the kind of being of innerworldly beings to present itself, but rather prescribes to the world, so to speak, its "true" being on the basis of an idea of being (being = constant objective presence) the source of which has not been revealed and the justification of which has not been demonstrated. Thus it is not primarily his dependence upon a science, mathematics, which just happens to be especially esteemed, that determines his
ontology of the world, rather his ontology is determined by a basic ontological orientation toward being as constant objective presence, which mathematical knowledge is exceptionally well suited to grasp.* In this way Descartes explicitly switches over philosophically from the development of traditional ontology to modem mathematical physics and its transcendental
foundations.” (Being and Time) — Joshs

Can you cite the page and translation please?

The appearance and the real turned into the appearing doesn't get us out of the original desire, which Heidegger falls back on only in the later work. — Antony Nickles

For Heidegger, that which ‘appears’ is not an outside which shows itself to a self, an inside. In the first
place , Heidegger does not view Dasein from the vantage of a subject-object binary. If one instead speaks of self and world, then Dasein belongs to both poles. Specifically , the self is constantly changing creation. It exists in unveiling itself by projecting itself on a possibility. What it projects itself on is its world. So the self is its world as the possibility that it projects itself into. Put differently , the self is the tripartite structure of temporality as the past anticipating itself into the future.

“The phenomenological con­cept of phenomenon, as self-showing, means the being of beings-its meaning, modifications, and derivatives. This self-showing is nothing arbitrary, nor is it something like an appearing. The being of beings can least of all be something "behind which" something else stands, something that "does not appear”.”

Page 89 of Stambaugh.

Appreciate that -- very different from Robinson translation, which is why I didn't recognize it.

Great posts guys! I like the idea that we are throwness and that we are time. The two ideas are very similar actually. Things "that be" are affected by time and if we are time we are not separate from the world. Thus "being" is "phenomenal" and nothing ever is purely static or purely flux.

B&T end with Hegel. This is interesting because the first 4 sections of Phenomenology of Spirit (Sense, Perception, Understanding, Self-Consciousness) are a forerunner to what Heidegger stood for