as a consequence --- that the modern, to the extent they're based on the ancient, are error-ridden. — tim wood

This conclusion seems like a hasty one to make. Maybe the ancient one is the incorrect one.

The first question on this road is, is Being an artifact of language (i.e, in itself meaningless)? That is, as language is a kind of template laid over the world, does the excavation of Being really mean digging just and only in language, with the consequence that "Being" would have only a language-function that once understood can and should be discarded. Or is it more? — tim wood

Well, this would suggest that without language you simply would not Be, which is of course not the case.

Perhaps i'm not picking up what you're putting down.

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Ah, but the most important question is whether Being beings, as Heidegger said the Nothing nothings. If Being doesn't being, and the Nothing nothings, the Nothing will eventually nothing Being, which means that nothing will be, as the Nothing will in that case have nothinged.

Sorry. Obviously, the issue of Being is one I find it hard to take seriously.

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Well, this would suggest that without language you simply would not Be, which is of course not the case. — MPen89

Excuse me butting in. There is on Heidegger's view in this essay a clear set of relations between being and language:

...in the breakaway of humanity into Being...language, the happening in which being becomes word, was poetry. Language is the primal poetry in which a people poetizes Being. — Heidegger Metaphysics

His language often becomes tortured but the insight is sometimes worth digging for, I think. He argues that 'apprehension happens for the sake of Being' and that this what Parmenides, back at the start of this philosophical enterprise, understood. Humanity - Dasein in Heidegger's formulation - both illuminates and does violence to Being, the primitive state, through the emergence of logos, of making sense, through language.

[using a different translator from tim wood]

Perhaps you feel metaphysics is akin to science in that modern is (usually) better, righter, or even best and right; and that older ideas, unless they're in the direct descent of modern ideas, are merely quaint, of merely antiquarian interest. — tim wood

Well, I like being silly now and then.

More seriously regarding "Being," if the question being asked is "Why is there something rather than nothing?" I think that's a question best addressed by science, unless we're content with the results of mere speculation. But it's important to determine just what it is that's considered the subject matter of metaphysics. First causes? "Being as such"? The "problem of Universals"?

The first question on this road is, is Being an artifact of language (i.e, in itself meaningless)? That is, as language is a kind of template laid over the world, does the excavation of Being really mean digging just and only in language, with the consequence that "Being" would have only a language-function that once understood can and should be discarded. Or is it more? — tim wood

Being is not a "thing" (an ontic entity), nor is it some transcendental realm beyond our understanding. Being is that which distinguishes the existent from the non-existent. Dasein is that which can understanding the ontological distinction, and for whom this distinction is important (because it produces anxiety).

We say, "It is," or "Things are." Each thing is, in some sense. Does each thing "be" in the exact same way? Or is Being (i.e., the Being of beings) a many, each being Being in its own way? — tim wood

Heidegger goes to great lengths explaining how things "be" in different ways - at least, existence discloses itself to us (Dasein) in various ways. The most common way things present themselves to us is in terms of tool-use: things are "ready-at-hand".

But another way things appears to us is what Heidegger called "present-at-hand", or "presence", where things seem to simply exist as a Cartesian-esque extended entity in space-time, with a certain set of qualities that are well represented by mathematics. Heidegger thought almost all of Western metaphysics was utterly obsessed with the present-at-hand and forgot about the ontological distinction, which the Pre-Socratics apparently recognized. He also thought that technology made it worse, as technology reduces everything to mere numbers, quantities, piles.

Heidegger's analysis ultimately points to the identification of Being (in this case, Dasein's Being), with time.

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To get on the way to my question, I'm asking the preliminary question, whether Being is simply a semantic tool that allows language a way to refer to things, or if Being has some significance in itself beyond that. What do you say? — tim wood

Being is an English language present participle (i.e., present tense verbal form used as an adjective) which refers to something that actually exists.

Does each thing "be" in the exact same way? — tim wood

Things may be a property, condition, context, action, event, process, interaction, or behaviour.

To get on the way to my question, I'm asking the preliminary question, whether Being is simply a semantic tool that allows language a way to refer to things, or if Being has some significance in itself beyond that. What do you say? — tim wood

I tend to think the concept of Being has no significance whatsoever, frankly, except in the history of philosophy, and as an object lesson in the dangers of reification.

Being is an English language present participle (i.e., present tense verbal form used as an adjective) which refers to something that actually exists....
Things may be a property, condition, context, action, event, process, interaction, or behaviour. — Galuchat

This is all very anti-metaphysical. Maybe that's where one ends up but I think it would be fairer to Heidegger, and to Tim, who is asking metaphysical questions, to acknowledge that there is a more complicated and yet primal place to start. What is this philosophical enterprise trying to address and understand?

One pleasure I got from reading Heidegger is that, wordily strange as he is (and a Nazi and all the rest), he confronts this question head-on, What is philosophy about? And from the question, in quite a small space of 'Being and time' - which I know better than the Metaphysics - he unfolds/discloses how he sees human life and its place in the schema of Being. So he rapidly arrives at the notion of humanity, 'Dasein', 'thrown into life' as we are amid a zillion notions not our own - amid, as he initially characterizes stuff, more simply than you, two sorts of thing - the ready to hand, i.e. stuff that Dasein uses, and the present at hand, the rest of our context.

So it is a systematic working outwards from Being, the elusive bedrock of everything, to human life and its concerns.

It's interesting to me that when I've lately wanted to explore the philosophy of emotions and mood, I've found that even analytic philosophers writing about such matters find themselves going back to Heidegger, because there is a route-map there from the basic primitive of Being, through the basics of how we humans are in the world, to the complexity of all our actions and ideas.

It's interesting to me that when I've lately wanted to explore the philosophy of emotions and mood, I've found that even analytic philosophers writing about such matters find themselves going back to Heidegger... — mcdoodle

You have my attention. Please elaborate upon the connection. Thanks.

You have my attention. Please elaborate upon the connection. Thanks. — Galuchat

I'm not sure how elaborate I can be. I wrote a paper about mood earlier in the year (I was doing a graduate diploma) so I read a fair amount about that particular subject. An interesting example of the sort of person I mean is Matthew Ratcliffe, a Brit now teaching theoretical philosophy in Vienna. He's written a fair amount about depression, a philosopher working with psychiatric researchers, and his work about mood reached back originally to Heidegger, although more recent work has referenced Husserl more heavily. 'Being and time' of course related everything to angst, to fear/anxiety, but one can take the Heideggerian model of Dasein thrown into a world of bewilderment and conjure different ideas of what being in the world involves.

What is it to 'be in the world'? The approach that links phenomenology, analytic phil and psychologists examines 'mood' as the foundation of emotions and cognition. Ratcliffe argues for the notion of 'deep mood', which manifests itself for instance in depression or bipolar disorder, as such problems are generally viewed as 'mood disorders', although we have little concept of what an orderly or ordered mood would be. Mood is a mental state that's hard to shift and not easily susceptible to analysis. Ratcliffe also uses the notion of 'existential feeling' to approach these deeper states.

There is quite a lot of psychological work about 'moods' in a vaguer and more superficial sense, developing binary scales of positive/negative emotion, relating them to bodily states. The conceptual foundation of this work doesn't go down very deep, so there are many alternative models of day-to-day mood.

'Being and time' of course related everything to angst, to fear/anxiety, but one can take the Heideggerian model of Dasein thrown into a world of bewilderment and conjure different ideas of what being in the world involves. — mcdoodle

Do you and/or Heidegger have a general definition of "(B/b)eing" that can be used as a starting point for conceptual development, and how does that relate to the historical "Categories of Being" proposed by Aristotle, Kant, Peirce, and others?

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Do you and/or Heidegger have a general definition of "(B/b)eing" that can be used as a starting point for conceptual development, and how does that relate to the historical "Categories of Being" proposed by Aristotle, Kant, Peirce, and others? — Galuchat

Heidegger is pretty straightforward about this issue (there's a sentence I never thought I'd write). It's the difference between ontic and ontological. The categories of Being in other philosophical hands are about entities and are ontic. Heidegger's more fundamental ontological question is about what is even the basis for such ontically divisible aspects of being. What are the presuppositions?

He then proposes that we can, in a long circle as it were, get at the presuppositions - at something about the ultimate nature of Being - by studying Dasein, which is humans' Being-in-the-world but also has, unique among aspects of Being, the ability to disclose Being to itself. So we come to phenomenology, as shaped by Husserl and redrafted by Heidegger.

Sorry, it's all clear as mud to me. But thanks for trying.

The first question on this road is, is Being an artifact of language (i.e, in itself meaningless)? That is, as language is a kind of template laid over the world, does the excavation of Being really mean digging just and only in language, with the consequence that "Being" would have only a language-function that once understood can and should be discarded. Or is it more? — tim wood

Discussions of "being" always immediately bog down in differences of definition expressed in convoluted language. It can be frustrating and pointless. In reading the responses to your post so far, you can see that different posters mean different things when they say the word.

I won't jump into that fray except to respond to the quote above. In my opinion, yes, being is an artifact of language. It is human, not inherent in whatever is out there. I am partial to Lao Tzu's approach.

[1] The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao.
[2]The Tao is formless, meaningless. It can be experienced directly but not described.
[3] Speaking brings "the ten thousand things" into existence out of the Tao.

I haven't read Heidegger, so I don't know if that is the same as what he means. They probably have some connection.

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Do you and/or Heidegger have a general definition of "(B/b)eing" that can be used as a starting point for conceptual development, and how does that relate to the historical "Categories of Being" proposed by Aristotle, Kant, Peirce, and others

The formal definition Heidegger uses as a starting point is that "being is that which determines entities as entities, that on the basis of which entities have always been understood no matter how they are discussed." (pg 6 in German text)

In Being and Time Heidegger analysis three modes of being. In the order of primordility there's Existence, the being of dasein; the available, the being of equipment; and lastly there's occurrantness, the being of objects. How does this relate to Aristotle, Kant, Descartes? Well the claim is that their discussions of being are limited to the being of occurrantness, and for that reason they lack primordiality and constantly find themselves stuck in pseudo philosophical problems. E.g. the problem of the existence of the external world.

Hi. I'd be curious about how you might unpack that definition of being. What is the gist of Heidegger in your own words? Do you find this gist significant? If so, why? I'm not completely ignorant about H. I've looked at some books. Being thrown and being stretched between the past and the future makes sense to me. I understand present-to-hand versus ready-to-hand. Supposedly being is time. If we are our own stretched lifeworlds, then that makes some sense.

Wouldn't mind hearing a good "digested" interpretation apart from the lingo. I have the Stambaugh translation & frankly it disgusts me. I do think H had some good ideas. But this translation at least strikes me as obscene. Words like "occurantness." Are they really necessary? Is this book written scientistically to conceal its anti-philosophical or anti-metaphysical thrust?

If you're interested in reading a really good unpacking/discussion of Heidegger's above preliminary definition of being I would very highly recommend read the introduction to William Blattner's Heidegger's Temporal Idealism. He discusses this in great depth.

Wouldn't mind hearing a good "digested" interpretation apart from the lingo. — n0 0ne

Okay well "that which determines entities as entities and that on the basis of which entities have always been understood no matter how they are discussed" seems to me to be the world. I read somewhere that Heidegger viewed his greatest philosophical accomplishment as his articulation of world. The claim is that Philosophy prior to him lacked any articulation of world/worldhood,etc.

So the question becomes, what is world? That is rather complicated. I think I might stop while I'm ahead and let someone else speak. But quickly, and leaving the lingo aside, the world is basically the shared background practices that we take for granted. Why are they taken for granted. Because they are background practices, they have to be for the most part. As phenomenologically backgrounded what the practices "determine" to be in the phenomenological foreground are entities and as the entities they are, e.g., hammers, nails, carpenters, etc. So the foreground is made sense of on the basis of the background world (being).

Here is a ditty I wrote on Heidegger a while back in response to a question (about the difference between the ontic and the ontological in Heidegger), which I quite like, so I kept it for recycling. It might help:

One way to understand what's going on is to recognize the difference that time - or temporality, rather - plays in distinguishing between ontic and 'ontological' entities. What makes Dasein unique, as it were, is that it is constituted along a temporal horizon: Dasein, as a finite subject in time, is temporally orientated towards death (being-toward-death). Death, in this sense, functions as a horizon of our acts, loading them with significance; given the finite amount of time I have as a living being, I can only do so many things, which in turns means having to forego other things. The things that I do end up doing, must have significance for me in this regard - the limit that death places on my life means that I cannot be indifferent to the sort of life I live. For Heidegger, it is this temporal orientation that bestows ex-istence to Dasein. To ex-ist is to be temporally orientated, to be ex-centric to oneself such that Dasein does not exist as a sheer actaulity of the here and now, but pro-jects oneself forward according to the temporal horizon that gives meaning to my life: to exist in the mode of possibility.

This is what Heidegger means by existence, and has nothing to do with our common use of it in debates about 'whether things exist or not'. To exist, for Heidegger, is to inhabit an existential structure orientated towards death. Heidegger's use of the 'world' moves along similar lines. 'World' in Heidegger carries with it existential weight, and is closer to the way in which 'world' is used when we say things like: "her world is coming down around her" or "his world was considerably brightened by her". To say that Dasein is being-in-the-world has nothing to do with being in 'the external world', so much as it has to do with occupying a meaningful or significant dimension of existence. To speak of Dasein being always-already in the world is to say that we live lives of significance (thanks to the temporal horizon afforded by our finitude), even if that significance is not of our choosing (this is what Heidegger means by our being 'thrown' into the world).

This is why it makes no sense, for Heidegger, to speak about an 'external' world - it is simply a category error. The world is neither internal nor external; this is what the neologism 'being-in-the-world' is meant to capture, the fact that Dasein 'structurally' wedded to the world - no world, no Dasein, and inversely, no Dasein, no world. So one must be very careful not to conflate our common understanding of 'world' with what Heidegger means by it. Lastly, to say that ontic entities do not 'have Being' is just to say that ontic entities do not exist according to the temporal/existential structure outlined above. A 'thing' has does not project about itself a space of potentiality which it has to negotiate thanks it to temporally finite existential structure. It exists simply in there here and now, as is, in the weight of it's sheer actuality (and 'exist' is the wrong word, even). You have to remember that Heidegger's use of terms is phenomenologically motivated, and their semantic shadings are coloured by that background. Anyway, that's my extremely simplified Heidegger 101.

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With respect to 'Being', basically this whole existential structure of time is what allows 'the determination of entities as entities', brings them forward into the clearing of 'the open', etc etc.

the world is basically the shared background practices that we take for granted. Why are they taken for granted. Because they are background practices, they have to be for the most part. — bloodninja

Thank you. I truly appreciate that you humored me with the risk of a paraphrase. I actually am familiar with the concept of World through secondary sources, and I always liked it. Beings are revealed to us (brought "up" from the background) in terms of our projects? Sometimes they are invisible extensions of us. Sometimes we contemplate them isolated from use.The finitude thrust upon us by the consciousness that we must die shakes us from absorption in the They. We die alone. That we exist as possibility is arguably possible through desire alone. Hard to say what immortality would do to change things. If Dasein is only Dasein it if Dasein dies.

So the mystery for me is why Being and Time was written the way it was. Why all the technical terms, divisions, the pompousness? It's as if the content and form are hellishly dissonant.

This is why it makes no sense, for Heidegger, to speak about an 'external' world - it is simply a category error. The world is neither internal nor external; this is what the neologism 'being-in-the-world' is meant to capture, the fact that Dasein 'structurally' wedded to the world - no world, no Dasein, and inversely, no Dasein, no world. — StreetlightX

Thanks for the passage. Would you say that this is something like the revenge of common sense and/or emotional intelligence on the artificiality of epistemological tangles? Let's say that we further paraphrased your paraphrase into even simpler language. Would not the average person be tempted to agree? Did he just inject a worldly "emotional" intelligence into an otherwise arcane and dryly "theological" game? This is not intended to diminish the accomplishment, but only to try to specify it.

In the general context of the thread, here's a different take on being, related in my mind to Wittgenstein and Heidegger. We can define being as the groundlessness of beings. It is the abyss over which beings shine.

For Wittgenstein, for instance, it is not how but that the world exists that is "the mystical." Why is there something rather than nothing? Is this a "pseudo-question"? A lyrical "cry" of wonder that looks like a question? What answer could we hope to give that would not be itself subject to the question? If the answer is X, then why is there X rather than nothing?

A second question: how is this "why" made possible? What is this recognition of contingency? Is this some deep part of our nature? A necessity? If human being is somehow essentially the recognition or projection of contingency (via the imagination?), then is the human world or world for humans necessarily "cracked" by our ability to zoom out from or negate the given? IMO, philosophy is especially this kind of recognition of contingency. The background assumption, the norm of the discourse, is brought forth to hover over the abyss of its non-necessity, its contingency.

For instance, with Nietzsche perhaps the moral background of philosophy (Truth as an idol, etc.) is brought before the corrosive contingency-projection of reason --in the name of this same Truth.

Thanks for the passage. Would you say that this is something like the revenge of common sense and/or emotional intelligence on the artificiality of epistemological tangles? Let's say that we further paraphrased your paraphrase into even simpler language. Would not the average person be tempted to agree? Did he just inject a worldly "emotional" intelligence into an otherwise arcane and dryly "theological" game? This is not intended to diminish the accomplishment, but only to try to specify it. — n0 0ne

I'm super, super hesitant to concede that there is anything like a singular 'common sense' to begin with that Heidegger's views would align with. In fact, one of my favorite critiques of Hiedegger's phenomenological project in B&T comes from William Connolly, who suggests that the whole thing is a very idealized, 'serene' phenomenology which presupposes a whole set of unarticulated conditions about the kind of life it characterizes:

"The links [Heidegger's phenomenology] forges between life and foreknowledge of death, individuality and connectedness, choice and foreclosure, individual and collective life in the present and projections of future prospects for both, presume, first, a close alignment between the identity the self seeks to realize and socially available possibilities of self-formation and, second, a shared sense of confidence in the world we are building, a confidence that links the present to the future through effort and anticipation at one time and memory and appreciation at another. If these connections, sentiments, and projections become severely attenuated, the serene phenomenology of freedom and finitude also becomes strained and anachronistic. To retain it would then be to cling insistently to a picture of the world belied by individual and collective experience... I think something like this is occurring today." (Connolly, Identity\Difference)

Alphonso Lingis similarly criticizes the presumption that the 'world' of which Heidegger speaks is as unitary as he makes it out to be, and thus is not in accord with everyday experience, because of the discontinuity of experience. What Heidi misses for Lingis is the entire realm of the sensuous:

"What, then, is new in Heidegger is not only positing a real experience of the world as a whole, but locating this experience in an agent become discontinuous and singular. But crucial moves in Heidegger's reasoning seem to us unintelligible ... Heidegger argues that the sense of the irreversible propulsion of a life toward its end precedes and makes possible every unilateral array of means toward particular ends and every determinate action. But can death, which has no front lines and no dimensions, assign a determinate direction to one's life, and thereby impart a unilateral direction to the connections in the instrumental field? ...Death is neither present nor future; it is imminent at any moment. How could death then fix the end and bring to flush the ends possible in the time that lies ahead?

... The authentic life that integrates its temporal trajectory from its birth to its death in each of its projects finds its own possibility traced out, Heidegger explains in Being and Time, and left for it by those who pursued their own paths to their own deaths. ... [But] about the few things that are really things with which we live - an old coffee mug, a carved and padded armchair, a violin, a pearl-oyster shell on the window sill - does not the wide world, the common world, break up into so many discontinuous spaces full of dreams and memories? Heidegger's analysis ... argues that things are essentially means; - each mundane end is a means in turn. The relay from implement to implement and to work being done returns to the manipulator. ...But does not the finality in things also come to an end in them? Water which one knows in the savoring and in the drinking, berries which one gathers and which melt in one' s mouth as one walks through the meadow do not catch our eye as refurbishments for our cells and muscles and means for our projects; they are substances in which sensuality glows and fades away" (Lingis, Sensation: Intelligibility in Sensibility).

To these one may add the feminist critiques like those found in the work of Iris Marion Young (Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays, speaking about the pregnant body, and so on and so fourth. Heidi is definitely not the last word when it comes to speaking about our everyday experiences - although he is a good start.