Because nobody would understand what the time was otherwise haha. But I think Blattner/Heidegger argue that originary temporality is more or less the framework that makes sense of, or structures, world time — bloodninja

Right. But this orginary time seems to be quite un-time-like, except for its ability to explain time as we (vaguely) conceive it. So the "future" and "past" and "present" of originary time (as I'm understanding Blattner) only get their misleading names this way. The idea of existence as "pure act" comes to mind. The original future, present, and past are just aspects of a unity. That's what I'm picking up. What is the structure of this unity? of this "how"?

So world time, I think, or perhaps the temporality of circumspective concern, is the "making present" within the non-successive, finite future/past of originary temporality. — bloodninja

Do you mean the making present of entities? That makes sense to me. We have a making present of meaningful beings, understood against the background or horizon of time in its various modes. Is the pressing forward of future just a spin on this presencing? A spin on the meaning of the entity disclosed? This "spin" is most basically explained by the for-the-sake-which of self-understanding? That seems plausible to me.

Doesn't the ideal in the sense you are using it imply a conscious awareness of it? I'm not so sure that is the level at which Heidegger is doing his phenomenology. I'm not denying that we don't all have ideals. — bloodninja

I didn't mean to suggest that such ideals must be conscious. Of course I realize that Heidegger is largely significant by digging much deeper than (self-)consciousness. I think Dreyfus even stresses that the 'for-sake-of-which' terminology was invoked to avoid an interpretation in terms of conscious motive.

I suggest that what I'd call ironism is a phenomenology of motive. It digs up or unveils what mostly functions as an invisible framework. As I see it, this "bringing-to-light" of a framework is simultaneously a distancing from or negation of the framework. The "necessary" becomes contingent and therefore optional. We could define freedom in terms of this "corrosion" of merely-apparent-in-retrospect necessity. If Blattner is right and I understand him correctly, then Heidegger is (among other things) doing "ironism" on a deeper level. But he's more interested in being, so it's only a station on the way for him. If philosophy is or should be fundamental ontology, then (as I understand it) he's doing a "pre-science" of the most fundamental framework. Nevertheless, giving the primordial future a key position in his theory does suggest a somewhat neglected connection to The Irony.

This, in turn, forces us to recognize that the possible ways to be Dasein are not possible as potentially actualizable, that Dasein presses ahead into a future that never can become present. — Blattner

This connects to Sartre, too. It reminds me of the (impossible) desire of the for-itself to have substantial being without losing its freedom.

On 'pastness' (for Bloodninja): If you look at endnote 29 in the Farin translation of The Concept of Time, I think it becomes clear that 'pastness' involves a seeing of ourselves as already dead. We imagine ourselves in terms of the stain we have left behind. We are yanked out of the they by a horror of having left no mark, of having died a nobody who just went with the flow. We became nothing, left the most radical possibilities of ourselves as creative interpretation unused, wasted. We never really lived in the sense that we never really lived our death. Or we lived our death as demise, dying as 'one' dies, like the 'humans' in Brave New World.

I think that end note is written by Farin, not Heidegger, and so at best, it can only be taken as an interpretation of what Heidegger was trying to get across in using 'pastness'. I might be wrong, but to me the Farin interpretation in that endnote cannot be right. He seems to be interpreting pastness from an understanding of time as an endless succession of nows yet to come when he says: "at some point one's dasein will be over, a thing of the past. But of course its past status is yet to come. It lies in the future so to speak."

In the text itself, the sentences following endnote 29 read: "[In anticipating death...] There is no remaining in the world of concerned engagement.... [others] disappear when the world fades into the background." And in the next paragraph he writes: "So being-in is directed to a state in which it finds that 'nothing whatsoever' can affect it, that is, its being before nothing. This nothing, as that which dasein is faced with, throws dasein's being back solely on to itself. This ownmost 'in-itself' will no longer be 'there' in the world. This 'pastness', which is in each case one's own, pulls dasein back from its lostness in the 'one'."

From what I've quoted above, Heidegger seems to be talking about attunement/being-in. And he seems to be more or less equating this with pastness, to me. Do you read him differently?

This Farin translation is a great text! I plan to read it properly, but I have been quite busy the past few days. It was very interesting what you said above regarding ironism. It's actually the first time I have come across that term. Rorty is definitely on my reading list!

It has been a while since I read Brave New World. Do the test tube humans never get old because they undergo a tranquilised sedated demise as one does just because it's what one does? If so it is an absolutely ingenious example to use as a contrast to what Heidegger must mean by death. For those 'humans' in BNW (I'm not sure what they call themselves) Heideggerian death would be impossible. Would those beings in BMW even be dasein? Hardly... I should reread the book.

Throughout the death chapter he constantly refers to dasein's 'wholeness'. So this obviously key to any interpretation of death, and I think it's also a key to what he means by originary temporality. — bloodninja

May I cheat and quote from The History of the Concept of Time? I realize that this is a slightly earlier work, but I find that the lectures are (as might be expected) clearer.

By suicide I surrender the possibility precisely as possibility....The possibility is however just what it is only when it is left standing, that is, when it is left standing before us as impending. A relationship of being to it must be such that I am precisely the possibility itself...The being must run forward toward the possibility, which has to remain what it is. I come as it were into the nearest nearness to it. But as I approach it in this way, the possibility does not become a world, say, but becomes more and more a possibility and more authentically only a possibility.

In dying, the world is only that which has nothing more to say to my own being. In dying,...the world is that upon which Dasein is no longer dependent...

[Dasein is thereby] purely and simply thrown back upon itself, so absolutely that even being-with in its concretion of 'to be with others' becomes irrelevant...[The] being is now transposed authentically directly to the 'I am.' Only in dying can I to some extent say absolutely, 'I am.'
— Heidegger

How about this interpretation? I am the possibility of my death because death is that which can 'carve out' the I from the world it is usually immersed in. It is the vividness of this possibility that 'liberates' the 'I am' from the 'we are.'

From Ontology: The Hermeneutics of Facticity:

The everydayness of Dasein has its Dasein there for itself and seeks it on the path of heeding what the others say about it, what its pursuits look like to the others, how the other others in advance come to appearance within it pursuits.
— Heidegger

This reminds me of Kundera's Immortality, which features a dying Goethe experience a new authenticity in his freedom from his own fame, his own legacy. A seductive young woman positions herself as a sort of parasite on his legacy, endearing herself to him and (once he becomes wary) his mother. This disturbs him until the possibility of death becomes so vivid that he sees that this legacy means nothing to him. He lets it go. His vanity shatters against the vividness of the looming abyss, which lights up the world in a new way as...a great stage of drowsy fools?willfully blind to the abyss and their own ragged nakedness before that darkness? Is this darkness not the inmost core of the I in its the way? I am truly I myself 'only' as this possibility nears as such. Or perhaps I am in general possibility. I experience myself as possibility. Death is the greatest and most terrible possibility, one might say. So I experience myself as myself precisely here --at least at my most 'whole' or separate.

In my opinion, there is also the possibility of taboo sex and violence lurking in Heidegger's words. We are largely constrained by a commitment to the future. This is not to say that we would be monster in general without such an investment. I suggest rather that we would cease tolerating some situations in the name of an intact future.. A mundane example: we show up for work on 3 hours of sleep or no sleep. But we wouldn't do this if we had only a week to live. A less mundane example: a married man or woman is fairly happy, happy enough. It's an uncertain venture to start again, etc. But then this man or woman almost dies and (maybe) decides to no longer compromise and take the risk for something ideal rather than OK. Or an aging man for whom death becomes realer if not imminent dates a girl 'too young' for him in his friends' eyes. Or a man dying of cancer 'allows' himself to lose his temper at an insult. He is already 'going down,' so he is no longer motivated to swallow his outrage and be a respectable citizen. Professor Heidegger doesn't go into this, but he does go on to join the militaristic Nazi party.

Here's a little more. First we need 'guilt.'

The certainty of this possibility [of death] is seized when every other possible can-be of mine is set apart from it, that is, when the resoluteness toward itself is such that it is the source of the possibility of this or that action. If Dasein in forerunnning can bring itself into such an absolute resoluteness, it means that in this running forward toward its death Dasein can make itself responsible in an absolute sense. It 'can' choose the presupposition of being of itself, that is, it can choose itself. What is chosen in this choice is nothing other than willing to have a conscience. ...Forerunning is the choice of willing to have a conscience.
...
As an active being-with with others and as such, Dasein is eo ipso guilty, even when --and precisely when --it does not know that it is unjuring another or destroying him in his Dasein. With the choice of being willing to have a conscience, I have at the same time chosen to have become guilty. The genuine kind of being of Dasein corresponding to its utmost and ownmost possibility (the ownmost being-ahead-of-itself enacted by itself) is what we have characterized as the forerunning of willing to have a conscience, which at the same time means choosing the essential guilt of Dasein itself, insofar as it is. — Heidegger

So what do we have here? Somehow making the possibility of death vivid as possibility is also a choosing of 'the essential guilt of Dasein itself.' How can we make sense of this? If the 'one' is the largely unwritten Law, then personality as such is 'sin.' One of life's horrors for a sensitive heart is that what one does actually matters. I can hurt others, intentionally or not. I can do that which cannot be undone. Terrible crime is possible along with just accidentally running over someone's dog. Is this not 'original sin'?

But we also have this choosing of one's self, of taking personal responsibility. We don't speak from the anyone and everyone. We don't speak in a way that hides from our own speaking. We speak as agents who know our own guilt in this same speaking. In my view, 'authenticity' is correctly understood as an 'ego ideal' or virtue, despite protestations to the contrary. Or rather it describes a mode that Heidegger strove to remain in, a mode that made Heidegger as original and daring philosopher possible. Note in the underlined part that resoluteness makes (new) actions possible. Real resoluteness opens possibilities that are not just idle fantasies but even revolutions. In my view, we have a theory of the 'great' human here, liberated from the groundlessness and conformity of the they by a vision of death that nullifies their authority --which is only the not-yet-great human's fleeing from his own death-guilt. Ontological death is guilt in that the I is guilt and that the I is death as possibility --or most intensely I-like in the light of this vivid possibility.




It's the last section of this beautiful book (translated by Kisiel).

36. Time as the being in which Dasein can be its totality

But forerunning into my ownmost possiblity of being is nothing but the being of my ownmost coming to be being. Being guilty, which is posited in and with it, is the being of my ownmost having been. This being of having-been is the past, such that in such a being I am nothing but the future of Dasein and with it its past. The being, in which Dasein can be its wholeness authentically as being-ahead-of-itself, is time.

Not 'time is' but "Dasein qua time temporalizes it being." Time is not something which is found outside somewhere as a framework for world events. Time is even less something which whites away inside in consciousness. It is rather that which makes possible the being-ahead-of-itself-in-already-being-involved-in, that is, which makes possible the being of care.

The time which we know everyday and which we take into account is, more accurately viewed, nothing but the Everyone to which Dasein in its everydayness has fallen. The being in being-with-one-another in the world, and that also means in discovering with one another the one world in which we are, is being in the Everyone and a particular kind of temporality.
— Heidegger

The underlined part suggests that the authentic 'I' is born from death as possibility. Or the I 'is' (again) the possibility of death. Is this not Hegelian?

The presentation of itself, however, as pure abstraction of self-consciousness consists in showing itself as a pure negation of its objective form, or in showing that it is fettered to no determinate existence, that it is not bound at all by the particularity everywhere characteristic of existence as such, and is not tied up with life...And it is solely by risking life that freedom is obtained; only thus is it tried and proved that the essential nature of self-consciousness is not bare existence, is not the merely immediate form in which it at first makes its appearance, is not its mere absorption in the expanse of life. Rather it is thereby guaranteed that there is nothing present but what might be taken as a vanishing moment — that self-consciousness is merely pure self-existence, being-for-self. The individual, who has not staked his life, may, no doubt, be recognized as a Person; but he has not attained the truth of this recognition as an independent self-consciousness. — Hegel

As I read it, the authentic person is 'alone' in his own time. He has time. Time (the everyone) does not have him. He is not caught in the hurriedness, the gossip, the pre-interpretedness. His nakedness before the vividness of the possibility of death allows for a destruction of that which covers over his singular and guilty being-ahead-of-himself-in-already-being-involved. He is revealed to himself as a singular, guilty, dying uniqueness that cannot get behind itself to start fresh or flee to the irresponsible timeless universal.

In my opinion, this supports my interpretation given above. This is the foreward of a 1923 course (Ontology: The Hermeneutics of Facticity). Note that everyday Dasein is already 'here' in this course. Significant and famous B&T themes are already well developed (some of them).

Putting forth questions --questions are not happenstance thoughts, nor are questions the common 'problems' of today which 'one' picks up from hearsay and book learning and decks out with a gesture of profundity. Questions grow out of a confrontation with 'subject matter.' And subject matter is there only where eyes are.

It is in this manner that a number of questions will have to be 'posed' in this course, and all the more so considering that questioning has today fallen out of fashion in the great industry of 'problems.' Here one is in fact secretly at work abolishing questioning altogether and intent on cultivating a modesty of blind faith. One declares the sacrum [sacred] to be an essential law and is thereby taken seriously by one's age, which in its frailty and impotence has need for such a thing. One stands up for nothing more than the trouble-free running of the 'industry'! Having become ripe for the organization of mendacity, philosophy interprets its corruption as 'the resurrection of metaphysics.'

Companions in my searching were the young Luther and the paragon Aristotle, whom Luther hated. Impulses were given by Kierkegaard, and Husserl opened my eyes. This for those who 'understand' something only when they reckon it up in terms of historical influences, the pseudo-understanding of an industrious curiosity, i.e., diversion from what is solely at issue in this course and what it all comes to. One should make their 'tendency of understanding' as easy as possible for them so that they will perish of themselves. Nothing is to be expected of them. They care only about the pseudo. — Heidegger

Is Heidegger...King Slender? Because he's about to break the pseudos on daddy's knee. The primordial must reached by the penetration of its covering-over by a real man, a long-schlonged thinker of the first-most water.
(I intend this in a neutral tone, neither praising nor blaming.)

A footnote indicates:

The "Forward' was not delivered in this course. — editor

A theme that's starting to come into focus for me in the early Heidegger:

The How tends to be concealed by the What. The medium, in other words, tends to be concealed by the message. Our comportment toward things tends to go unnoticed , precisely because the thing dominates.

The past that lives (the primordial past) is exactly this un-thematized How or pre-grasping. This pre-grasping includes pre-conception. Phenenomological destruction or deconstruction draws this pre-conception out and makes it explicit. Only this way can it 'go backward' and recover the force of the elemental words and/or experience anew the choices (as choices) that shaped this usually unthematized and quietly dominant How.

Heidegger (as I understand it) only allowed Kant the possibility of having glimpsed primordial time (which involves an understanding of the primordial past as the 'how'.)

Perhaps it is no accident that Kant determined the fundamental principle of his ethics in such a way that we call it formal. He perhaps knew from a familiarity with Dasein itself that it is its 'how. It was left to contemporary prophets to organize Dasein in such a way that the 'how' is covered up. — Heidegger

This reminds me of 'formal indication,' which Kisiel emphasizes in The Genesis of Being and Time.

On another, related them, I think 'authentic Dasein' is something like a personification of radical phenomenology. Just as tarrying with the negative leads to the Hegelian standpoint, living the death of concerned immersion in the What of the present in personal death as possibility makes visible the how. The how of the day, the shared living past of the they, is simultaneously made visible and contingent.
This how or pre-grasping is (as I understand it) the medium through which entities are understood in there that-they-are and what-they-are, which is to say being.

Since the how 'evolves,' so does being. Being, the deepest framework, is apparently unstable. The individual human being can attain clarity about his own temporality and understand the temporality of the they --world-historical temporality.

In doing so it is not that one has become 'tired' of previous philosophy and would now set about thinking up a new system and try out whether it not be possible, for a change, in this way. It is not decisive whether that which is to be obtained is shockingly new or whether it is old, or whether from out of this a system is really to be built or not. Something else is at stake, namely to lead philosophy from out of its alienation back to itself (phenomenological destruction). (The genuine is always new because the old has always in some sense necessarily become un-genuine for us. ) — Heidegger

from Phenomenology of Intuition and Expression.

As I read him, this overcoming of alienation involves a union of the 'spiritual' and the scientific. That the scientific at its most radical could exist apart from the 'spiritual' perhaps the superstition of a half-dead 'science.' Of course I have the pre-science or ur-science of radical phenomenology in mind. I'm thinking of spirit as Geist as living time. The 'infinite' standpoint (a fantasy the depends upon a covering up of the temporality of being) is a desiccating aim. And yet it may be the unavoidable and proper aim, in some sense. Our thrust against finitude is maybe the essence of philosophy, and unveiling the how (the living past or 'being' functioning as the framework disclosing entities) is itself an attempt to grab the unchanging formal structure. For me this feels like a radicalization of Kant and Hegel. It's formal like Kant, but the interpretative framework is dynamic as in Hegel. But it's more visceral. It moves in the twilight of the pre-theoretical. It aims at the dark origins of the theoretical.

He seems to be interpreting pastness from an understanding of time as an endless succession of nows yet to come when he says: "at some point one's dasein will be over, a thing of the past. But of course its past status is yet to come. It lies in the future so to speak."

In the text itself, the sentences following endnote 29 read: "[In anticipating death...] There is no remaining in the world of concerned engagement.... [others] disappear when the world fades into the background." And in the next paragraph he writes: "So being-in is directed to a state in which it finds that 'nothing whatsoever' can affect it, that is, its being before nothing. This nothing, as that which dasein is faced with, throws dasein's being back solely on to itself. This ownmost 'in-itself' will no longer be 'there' in the world. This 'pastness', which is in each case one's own, pulls dasein back from its lostness in the 'one'."

From what I've quoted above, Heidegger seems to be talking about attunement/being-in. And he seems to be more or less equating this with pastness, to me. Do you read him differently? — bloodninja

I speculate that 'pastness' is not really about an endless succession of nows but just a fancy way of talking about the possibility death. If death is intended as a first-person experience, then of course we can only intend death as possibility. How I do experience death as a possibility? For one thing, I imagine the world going on without me. I have become a part of the past. I can't do anything anymore. I am neutralized, thrown away.

Even though our actual death as demise is in the future, it exists (authentically) as vivid possibility in the present. The more vivid this possibility, the less inauthentic the timing of this death. The time 'between' now and my demise 'shrinks' to nothing. What does the ordinary measuring of time mean compared to the unmeasurable possibility of my death? The clocks melt. The covering-over of idle talk is blown away like dead leaves in the cold wind from an abyss become here-and-now. There's an ecstasy in this shattering-against along with the terror.

I think you're right about attunement being central here. The being-in as being-with is lost. Dasein is no longer 'there' in the world because he has 'surfaced' from the usual immersion. Or rather this is two ways of saying the same thing. Death as vivid possibility exists via an eerie attunement in which Dasein experiences its wholeness/separateness as an individual Dasein. I think this also makes the 'how' of the they visible or seeable-from-outside. We can't look at the bottom of the foot we are standing on --that's holding us up. My solitary death also allows me to view my culture from the outside --to some degree. The seeing-of-the-how is critical, non-neutral. So conformity (immersion in its benefits and safety) is a big part of the cover of the how. For me it's hard to ignore the old theme of facing death heroically here. The phenomenologist is a kind of warrior. 'Real' philosophy takes courage. It risks its own sanity, in a certain sense. It ventures into the untamed frontier alone. But this frontier is largely behind us in our dark origins or beneath us in the dark foundations of our lighting-things-up.

Please forgive me if I'm coming off as too sure of myself. All of this is provisional. If I state it forcefully it's just because I want to get it down with the feel and excitement of it for me. I often look back and decide that I was wrong, but I think it's valuable to paraphrase, paraphrase, paraphrase. To me this is a digging beneath the surface of phrases that can become routine and lose their force. I speculate that 'deconstruction' has lost its force. I have enjoyed some of Derrida, but I now see that the 'spiritual' motive of deconstruction was covered over by an excessive cleverness. And the cliche about pomo is that it is some cheap relativism. Since epistemology is so often assumed to be the essence of philosophy, this is to be expected.
Deconstruction must (from the outside) somehow be about doubt as opposed to revelation. Nevermind that such a shallow understanding of philosophy's potential is what deconstruction (destruction) destroys as a sort of heart-shrinking bondage.

I've posted quite a bit, but this is fascinating...

In "Heidegger and Hegel: Exploring the Hidden Hegelianism of Being and Time" Schwartz Wentzer picks up similar themes in arguing that Heidegger's hermeneutics of facticity is motivated by a revision of Hegelianism. He suggests that there is a parallel between the development of spirit in Hegel and Heidegger's view that philosophy arises in factical life as an understanding or interpretation of that factical life. In both cases, the insight is drawn from the claim that self-consciousness occurs in and through the development of history. Self-understanding not only occurs in history but takes a historical form. Thus, interpretation is subject to historical determination, and Dasein's self-understanding is always historically articulated. Schwartz Wentzer argues that Heidegger modifies Hegel by exchanging the Hegelian logic of a teleological dialectics for the method of hermeneutic destruction and the principle of subjectivity for the concept of facticity (144). — link

http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/hermeneutical-heidegger/

Was Heidegger a belated left Hegelian?

Last point is how this passage from Nietzsche resonates with Heidegger:

This faith does not formulate itself--it simply lives, and so guards itself against formulae....
It is only on the theory that no work is to be taken literally that this anti-realist is able to speak at all. Set down among Hindus he would have made use of the concepts of Sankhya,[7] and among Chinese he would have employed those of Lao-tse[8]--and in neither case would it have made any difference to him.--With a little freedom in the use of words, one might actually call Jesus a "free spirit"[9]--he cares nothing for what is established: the word killeth,[10] whatever is established killeth. The idea of "life" as an experience, as he alone conceives it, stands opposed to his mind to every sort of word, formula, law, belief and dogma. He speaks only of inner things: "life" or "truth" or "light" is his word for the innermost--in his sight everything else, the whole of reality, all nature, even language, has significance only as sign, as allegory.

Somehow making the possibility of death vivid as possibility is also a choosing of 'the essential guilt of Dasein itself.' How can we make sense of this? — 0rff

I think the only way to make guilt clear is to relate it to the care structure which is supposed to be an ontological characterization of how dasein exists. (Notice I used the word 'how' there. I think I read somewhere that 'the how' was eventually supplanted by the concept of 'care' in B&T. I think I must have read that in one of the many forewords in to the excerpts in his Basic Writings text I was skimming through recently.) So in B&T care is basically being ahead of itself (existence), being already in the world (facticity) as being alongside entities which we encounter within the world (falling). Guilt relates to facticity. He suggests that the only way that this purely formalised (i.e., formally indicated) existential concept is related to our everyday understanding of the same signifier is that both concepts share a 'lack' or a 'not' or a 'nullity'. Existential guilt has an existential nullity whereas everyday guilt has a present at hand or ready to hand nullity. He defines Guilty! or existential guilt in B&T as being the basis of a nullity. This existential nullity is specifically that we cannot get behind our thrownness. Or that we cannot choose the mattering into which we are thrown.

In B&T he says "How is dasein this thrown basis? Only in that it projects itself upon possibilities into which it has been thrown. The Self, which as such has to lay the basis for itself, can never get that basis into its power; and yet , as existing, it must take over being-a-basis..."

Hmm... similarly to how the different senses of guilt have differing ontological modes of nullity maybe the same is true of death. Perhaps biological perishing has a present at hand nullity? Demise, perhaps a case could be made that demise is intelligible only on the basis of a ready to hand nullity, maybe? Which leaves the existential nullity, death? As existential it is the future that will never arrive. Does that make sense? I mean maybe if we understand death purely existentially, then maybe death is the originary future, so to speak.

I think Heidegger's concept of wholeness too cannot be present at hand, nor ready to hand, but can only be an existential wholeness. As a contrast, an existentially unwhole existence would be loosing yourself in the cares and concerns of everydayness and the chatter of the they. Instead of loosing yourself, wholenesss would be winning yourself. As you quoted above:

The certainty of this possibility [of death] is seized when every other possible can-be of mine is set apart from it, that is, when the resoluteness toward itself is such that it is the source of the possibility of this or that action. — Heidegger

The seeing-of-the-how is critical, non-neutral. So conformity (immersion in its benefits and safety) is a big part of the cover of the how. — 0rff

I still feel confused about the how. Can you please repeat what you understand the how to mean?