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Dasein wouldn't be "da" if it wasn't with others. Of course that does not mean the factical presence of others but an existential-ontological determination, i.e. a necessity making it possible. — Heiko
Just turn the question around. — Heiko
Heidegger drops a little sentence about this — Heiko
Running forward to death implies the question for the conditions of the possibility of existing "Dasein" goes backward in time. — Heiko
How should the other have been if not "with"? The only possible answer: it has not been at all.
I do not think this is possible. — Heiko
§26 After the passage about Humboldt (I'm sorry I don't have an English Edition at hand).What sentence, and what is it about? — Dan123
Of course.Not sure what you mean here. — Dan123
The phenomenological assertion that “Dasein is essentially Being-with” has an existential-ontological meaning. It does not seek to establish ontically that factically I am not present-at-hand alone, and that Others of my kind occur. If this were what is meant by the proposition that Dasein’s Being-in-the-world is essentially constituted by Being-with, then Being-with would not be an existential attribute which Dasein, of its own accord, has coming to it from its own kind of Being. It would rather be something which turns up in every case by reason of the occurrence of Others. Being-with is an existential characteristic of Dasein even when factically no Other is present-at-hand or perceived. Even Dasein’s Being-alone is Being-with in the world. The Other can be missing only in and for(1) a Being-with. Being-alone is a deficient mode of Being-with; its very possibility is the proof of this. — Being and Time
By ‘Others’ we do not mean everyone else but me—those over against whom the ‘I’ stands out. They are rather those from whom, for the most part, one does not distinguish oneself—those among whom one is too… By reason of this with-like Being-in-the-world, the world is always the one that I share with Others. — Heidegger, (Being and Time 26: 154–5)
Just turn the question around. Heidegger drops a little sentence about this the term "Dasein" obviously implies first to be and then to be with, but that this "with" means basically with itself. — Heiko
The shared intelligibility indicated in being-with doesn't ring as relevant in a world where people think and feel so differently, where their minds appear to work with different motivations, with different propensities of moods and so on — fdrake
So, there are (at least) three potential ways to accuse Heidegger of being a solipsist. The first two are misinterpretations, but the third interpretation may be well founded. One by one, they are... — Dan123
1) to interpret Dasein as a present-at-hand entity/Cartesian subject. Take Being-with to be an internal capacity for 'grasping the social relationships/actions/meanings/etc within my subjective experience'. All the people and things I encounter within my experience are made possible by my internal capacities. My experience is private, and my experience is all there is or all there that can be known to be, ergo solipsism. — Dan123
What we ‘first’ hear is never noises or complexes of sounds, but the creaking waggon, the motor-cycle. We hear the column on the march, the north wind, the woodpecker tapping, the fire crackling… It requires a very artificial and complicated frame of mind to ‘hear’ a ‘pure noise’. The fact that motor-cycles and waggons are what we proximally hear is the phenomenal evidence that in every case Dasein, as Being-in-the-world, already dwells alongside what is ready-to-hand within-the-world; it certainly does not dwell proximally alongside ‘sensations’; nor would it first have to give shape to the swirl of sensations to provide a springboard from which the subject leaps off and finally arrives at a ‘world’. Dasein, as essentially understanding, is proximally alongside what is understood. — Heidegger, (Being and Time 34: 207)
2) to reduce The Others I encounter within-the-world to myself. I always-already project meaning such that everything I encounter is of sense or intelligible to me in terms of my concerns/projected possibilities/motivations or goals - "We're personally involved whenever we're involved". That is to say, I am the kind of Being who always and only understands through personal involvement [As essentially Becoming, I am thrown into a world that I grasp in turns of projected possibilities-for-myself. This opens up a world of sense that discloses to me that which I encounter.] Being-with is part of the formal structure of the possible social ways that I am involved or embedded in-the-world-that-is-personal-and-only-personal (where "personal" does not equate to 'private', but to "in terms of my concerns/goals/myself/etc". This is close to 1), without the Cartesianism, I think. — Dan123
Directly following the rule-following sections in PI, and therefore easily thought to be the upshot of the discussion, are those sections called by interpreters “the private-language argument”. Whether it be a veritable argument or not (and Wittgenstein never labeled it as such), these sections point out that for an utterance to be meaningful it must be possible in principle to subject it to public standards and criteria of correctness. For this reason, a private-language, in which “words … are to refer to what only the speaker can know—to his immediate private sensations …” (PI 243), is not a genuine, meaningful, rule-governed language. The signs in language can only function when there is a possibility of judging the correctness of their use, “so the use of [a] word stands in need of a justification which everybody understands” (PI 261). — SEP, Article on Wittgenstein
3) to view Being-with as an aspect of Dasein's existence structure that leaves much to be desired in the explaining-subjectivity/sense-through-others-department (can't believe I just wrote that). Heidegger's existential-ontological analysis of what it is to be a human-being does not A) satisfactorily ground nor account for a vast array of different ontical contexts that Dasein can find itself in or B) give us any interesting or advancing insight into the more specific structure of many ontical contexts so as to tell us something important about them. "Ontological structures and substructures" such as spatiality and Being-with don't tell us much of anything interesting or relevant about many ontical contexts. — Dan123
I applied an abbreviated form of Heidegger's critique of Descartes to the idea. Which I think pulls out the rug from under the feet of people who would claim Heidegger is solipsistic in this way. — fdrake
the main thrust of my criticism is that this is a necessary feature of his methodology rather than an incidental one, and that this stops him from seeing how some 'merely ontic' phenomena actually take part in the ontology of human being. — fdrake
The Others who are thus ‘encountered’ in a ready-to-hand, environmental context of equipment, are not somehow added on in thought to some Thing which is proximally just present-at-hand; such ‘Things’ are encountered from out of the world in which they are ready-to-hand for Others—a world which is always mine too in advance. In our previous analysis, the range of what is encountered within-the-world was, in the first instance, narrowed down to equipment ready-to-hand or Nature present-at-hand, and thus to entities with a character other than that of Dasein. This restriction was necessary not only for the purpose of simplifying our explication but above all because the kind of Being which belongs to the Dasein of Others, as we encounter it within-the-world, differs from readiness-to-hand and presence-at-hand. Thus Dasein’s world frees entities which not only are quite distinct from equipment and Things, but which also—in accordance with their kind of Being as Dasein themselves—are ‘in’ the world in which they are at the same time encountered within-the-world, and are ‘in’ it by way of Being-in-the-world. These entities are neither present-at-hand nor ready-to-hand; on the contrary, they are like the very Dasein which frees them, in that they are there too, and there with it. — Being and Time 26:118 (Marquarrie & Robinson, Trans.)
Ok so your main beef with Heidegger is, not only that his existential-ontological analysis can't account for many ontical contexts, but more so that he considers many aspects of life/what it is to be human to be 'ontic' that are in fact ontological and as such necessarily constitutive of life/everyday life/etc. In a sense I think I agree with you on the body: it seems that the body is for the most part always-already 'linked up with the whole of me' as I engage in milieus of meaning. If the world is opened up to me in such a way, my body automatically operates within the understanding that it helps to co-constitute, I guess. Though I think, for Heidegger at least, cases like broken-legs or the workday are for the most part already covered by the ontological analysis: a broken-leg disclosed as "broken" or how a broken-leg effects my self-identity is grounded on my-self understanding that is already in turns of mood-related and socially-constituted possibilities that I project and am thrown into. The workday can be explained as what it is by the web of spatial and social referential structures to which I am embedded and understand my workday through. — Dan123
Now for the more interesting way to charge Heidegger with solipsism, you have to change solipsism's meaning a bit to 'shows insufficient regard or emphasises poorly the role other people play with regard to human subjectivity'. More precisely, the allegation is that the formal conditions of Dasein, like thrownness, fallenness, projection, dispositions, comportments etc despite being ontologically primary and thus present in each person, Dasein's ontical constitution vis-a-vis social organisation and the Other (or more general ontical constraints like the body) is given insufficient emphasis. Problems here look like: the formal character of facticity does little to facilitate the understanding of how the workday effects people, the formal character of thrownness does not suffice to facilitate the analysis of moods like depression or joy. The analysis of Being and Time agglomerates the specifics of these things to their general constitution - and this is an inherent feature of the method Heidegger uses. Recursive exposition of transcendental/conceptual structure. — fdrake
Though I think, for Heidegger at least, cases like broken-legs or the workday are for the most part already covered by the ontological analysis: a broken-leg disclosed as "broken" or how a broken-leg effects my self-identity is grounded on my-self understanding that is already in terms of mood-related and socially-constituted possibilities that I project and am thrown into.
Ok so your main beef with Heidegger is, not only that his existential-ontological analysis can't account for many ontical contexts, but more so that he considers many aspects of life/what it is to be human to be 'ontic' that are in fact ontological and as such necessarily constitutive of life/everyday life/etc. In a sense I think I agree with you on the body: it seems that the body is for the most part always-already 'linked up with the whole of me' as I engage in milieus of meaning. If the world is opened up to me in such a way, my body automatically operates within the understanding that it helps to co-constitute, I guess. Though I think, for Heidegger at least, cases like broken-legs or the workday are for the most part already covered by the ontological analysis: a broken-leg disclosed as "broken" or how a broken-leg effects my self-identity is grounded on my-self understanding that is already in turns of mood-related and socially-constituted possibilities that I project and am thrown into. The workday can be explained as what it is by the web of spatial and social referential structures to which I am embedded and understand my workday through.
— Dan123
I explicitly anticipated this kind of response in my post, though it was a long post so it's understandable it wasn't a particularly memorable part. — fdrake
the allegation is that the formal conditions of Dasein, like thrownness, fallenness, projection, dispositions, comportments etc despite being ontologically primary and thus present in each person, Dasein's ontical constitution vis-a-vis social organisation and the Other (or more general ontical constraints like the body) is given insufficient emphasis. Problems here look like: the formal character of facticity does little to facilitate the understanding of how the workday effects people, the formal character of thrownness does not suffice to facilitate the analysis of moods like depression or joy. The analysis of Being and Time agglomerates the specifics of these things to their general constitution - and this is an inherent feature of the method Heidegger uses. — fdrake
The analysis of Being and Time agglomerates the specifics of these things to their general constitution — fdrake
, thenY is (a) condition of possibility for X — fdrake
X being grounded in Y should contain an account of how X is grounded in Y as a procedural component of an entity's behaviour. — fdrake
Though I think, for Heidegger at least, cases like broken-legs or the workday are for the most part already covered by the ontological analysis: a broken-leg disclosed as "broken" or how a broken-leg effects my self-identity is grounded on my-self understanding that is already in terms of mood-related and socially-constituted possibilities that I project and am thrown into.
if we start with a particular ontical context, and then cite the general transcendental conditions that make ontical context possible, there is no way to make known or explicitly get at the specific existentiell possibilities, involvement structures, specific ways of being concernfully engaged, specific moods that disclose things as that ontic context, etc so as to explain what the specific meaning or Being of that particular ontic context/event/occurence/entity is. Heidegger's analysis gives no criterion for determining these specificities given that all we have to work with is a particular ontic context and the general transcendental structure of Dasein. So even though a strict-Heideggerian explains the broken-leg example in terms of the general structure of Dasein, he still hasn't explained with enough specificity. While Heidegger does not deny that there is such specificity, he doesn't give a clear or satisfactory method to explicitly get at it. AHHH interesting. — Dan123
Also, Are most people on this forum grad students/philosophy students/professors, etc? People who just enjoy philosophy? Both? — Dan123
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