I've read Being in Time twice through, but certain parts many times. Be happy to talk about it.

See this here: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/12109/what-is-being/p1

And this: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/8492/martin-heidegger/p1

And let me know what you think, if interested.

See this here: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/12109/what-is-being/p1 — Mikie

A brave move, putting Heidegger out there. Mostly I see science majors posting in the belief that science covers philosophy, and I have a hard time convincing them otherwise.

The interpretation of beings in terms of presence occurs in a certain mode of the human being -- the "present at hand," as Heidegger calls it, which is a quite derivative or "privative" mode of our existence, because we're coping, habitual beings engaged in the world through our "ready-to-hand" activity, mostly unconsciously when looked at it in terms of average everyday behavior. To see something as an object, present before us, with properties is not how we usually see things -- unless things break down or we're in a contemplative mood. — Mikie

An interesting question for Heidegger is, how is it that presence at hand can at all be just this, existentially, that is? My understanding is that the perceptual act itself, qua perceptual act, should qualify all that is perceived as ready to hand. I get this from Dewey and Rorty especially: To observe something in the world ontically, like any scientist would, is to bring forth a history that offers interpretative possibilities for meaning making, but once one is already IN such a setting of culture and language, the pragmatists tell, us, we are in a forward looking ontology (though, traditionally didn't talk like this. Dewey never used the term). Heidegger's discussion of ready to hand is amenable to this, but his ontology is about the "totality" of our finitude, and this makes him massively more interesting. At any rate, this historical accounting of one's possibilities refers one, not unlike the hammer or the ink bottle, to infancy's ready to hand learning, and this includes language itself: just as one acquires the skill to aim a hammer, one acquires the skill of what could be called vacant referencing, that is, just noting that there is a bottle, there a cloud, and so on, which is the kind of thing Heidegger had in mind with presence at hand. He writes:

"Nature" is not to be understood as that which is just present-at-hand, nor as the power of Nature. The wood is a forest of timber, the mountain a quarry of rock; the river is water-power, the wind is wind 'in the sails'. As the 'environment' is discovered, the 'Nature' thus discovered is encountered too. If its kind of Being as ready-to-hand is disregarded, this 'Nature' itself can be discovered and defined simply in its pure presence-at-hand. But when this happens, the Nature which 'stirs and strives', which assails us and enthralls us as landscape, remains hidden. The botanist's plants are not the flowers of the hedgerow; the 'source' which the geographer establishes for a river is not the 'springhead in the dale'.”

Interesting that he would call it "pure" given his objections to Husserl's thesis on the intuition of "pure" phenomena. Heidegger accused (a very good read on this is Caputo's Radical Hermeneutics) Husserl of "walking on water" over his knowledge claims of an absolute foundation that grounds naturalistic experiences.

Later, in What IS Metaphysics, Heidegger explains this "nothing" (lifted from Kierkegaard Concept of Irony. Reading Kierkegaard, one finds a lot of what grounds later phenomenologists' work) which I take to be ready to hand suspended, along with it all the meaning we engage the world in. A sort of blank stare at being in which nothing at all occurs, and one can see his complaint against traditional metaphysics here, this Cartesian res extensa being of beings. Interesting to note in Conversation on a Country Path about Thinking, he brings up Meister Eckhart, though only in passing. Heidegger was at first trained to be a religious thinker. There is a lot in the later Heidegger that leans this way.

So essentially I am saying presence at hand is not what Heidegger says it is, as the vacant look upon the world, stripped of ready to hand, is actually constituted by ready to hand. I base this on Heidegger's concept of space and deseverence, for one thing. I encounter a fence post, and in Heideggarian "space" ready to hand leaps into play, according to the "regions" of associated ideas that rise into play, "always already" there in the environment. These always attend, in the spontaneous grasp of what "is" there.

The question is, then, how can presence at hand make any sense. To me, it sounds like an existentiell concept, not ontological, because it doesn't survive analysis.

I like Heidegger's ideas and feel he talks a lot of sense, although do not feel he cracked the case. Much of his work is too difficult for me but I like these comments.

The first is made in his inaugural lecture at Frieberg Uni. in 1929. He states that Western philosophy studies beings but not Being, and that this is no mere mistake. This is obvious, but sometimes obvious remarks are important and need saying.

The second seems remarkably prescient. It comes from a speech given to commemorate a composer friend in 1955. .

"Man finds himself in a perilous position…A far greater danger threatens [than the outbreak of a third world war]: the approaching tide of technological revolution in the atomic age could so captivate, bewitch, dazzle and beguile man that calculative thinking may someday come to be accepted and practiced as the only way of thinking. What great danger then might move upon us? Then there might go hand in hand with the greatest ingenuity in calculative planning and inventing, indifference towards ‘meditative’ thinking, total thoughtlessness. And then? Then man would have denied and thrown away his own special nature – that he is a meditative being. Therefore the issue is keeping meditative thinking alive."

The third may be the most profound insight of which anyone is capable, from his inaugural lecture again. . .
“ “Pure Being and pure Nothing are therefore the same.” This proposition of Hegel’s (Science of Logic, vol. I, Werke III, 74) is correct.”

Great philosopher I would say, but often damn difficult to read.

Can you link to the second quote?

I have this reference but not the original. . .

Martin Heidegger
Speech commemorating German composer Conradin Kreutzer in 1955
(from Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind – Guy Claxton p207)