61
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

Could you expand on this point a bit? To me, it seems that the desert-island example is an example where both there are ontically no other factically present persons and Being-with is an existential-ontological condition of that desert-island Dasein's Being. That seems to be compatible with what you are saying. No?

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. Running forward to death implies the question for the conditions of the possibility of existing "Dasein" goes backward in time. 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.

Just turn the question around. — Heiko

Turn the question around to what?

Heidegger drops a little sentence about this — Heiko

What sentence, and what is it about?

Running forward to death implies the question for the conditions of the possibility of existing "Dasein" goes backward in time. — Heiko

In Being-towards-death, Dasein is brought back from its lostness in 'the-they' and faces up to its mortality in anxiety. This makes authenticity possible. Even when inauthentic, Dasein is still anxious about the posisibility of its-not-being, but that anxiety is "dimmed down". I'm not sure what you mean when you say that Dasein "goes backward in time though."

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

Not sure what you mean here.

What sentence, and what is it about? — Dan123

§26 After the passage about Humboldt (I'm sorry I don't have an English Edition at hand).
Must be something like "But the expression Dasein indicates clearly .... because Dasein is essentially Being-with". What? How? This does not concern Dasein itself. Just the conditions of it's possibility. How could this be a concern in phenomenology, right? I don't think so.

Not sure what you mean here. — Dan123

Of course.

Heidegger mentions Humboldt in §34, the section on Discourse. There, Heidegger contrasts his understanding of language to Humboldt's.

I think I found the quote you are talking about. In §26, Heidegger says

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

So, Being-with does concern Dasein itself. Being-with is not the condition for the possibility of Dasein. To name 'Dasein' is to invoke the conditions of the possibility of the encounters Dasein has with others and things within the shared milieu of meaning to which it is embedded. Being-with does not come before Dasein. Being-with is constitutive of Dasein qua Being-in-the-world. Being-with is a 'part' of Dasein: it is an existentiale. So, Being-with makes possible specific enounters within-the-world, but it does not makes Dasein as such possible. Being-with is (part of) Dasein.

For Heidegger, Being-with is a concern for phenomenology because Being-with is a constitutive structure of how 'the phenomena' is disclosed to Dasein within-the-public-world to which Dasein constitutively belongs.

Charging Heidegger with solipsism because of how 'being-with' works is something I've not seen before. I can think of two ways of doing it with misinterpretations, the first boring the second not, and one way of doing it more faithfully to the text.

To get the misinterpretation out of the way, the human standpoint which engenders solipsism - the language game + form of life if you're looking at him from a pragmatic or Wittgensteinian view - just isn't the one that Heidegger's describing with Dasein. The conceptual landscape of solipsism opposes a thinking subject and its sensations from all objects and its properties; they are separated by an uncrossable epistemic boundary. This just isn't the every-day standpoint of a human - which Heidegger denotes Dasein -, in which we knowingly do stuff with things driven by motivations and goals. Framing things the thinking subject + sensed object way occludes most of the questions Heidegger wants to ask.

Heidegger's critique of Descartes operates similarly to this, he indicates that the thinking subject, the objects it encounters in appearance, and their relationship are posited as present-at-hand in the structure that makes solipsism makes sense. Present-at-hand can essentially be read as 'just a thing', which is a bit different from how we relate to things in general - which is always exercising competences in some meaningful context.

Looking specifically at 'being-with', you can translate it harmlessly as sociality - the capacity for social phenomena; making relationships with others, finding others actions' intelligible or meaningful, that kind of thing.

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)

You can find that quote and more exegesis on SEP here. Far from being solipsistic, for you Wittgensteinians reading it like @Banno, being-with operates like a 'private language argument' on the level of intelligibility rather than sense. Sense is public, but so are the intelligible structures we encounter.

So yeah, that's the first boring misinterpretation. The slightly more interesting second one I see here is:

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

Which is making an argument like: Heidegger's account of Dasein is solipsistic because it encounters other Dasein in the world, which are equivalent (in an unspecified sense) to Dasein.

It's a bit more interesting, because it highlights a methodological subtlety in Heidegger. When Heidegger's describing Dasein, he's aiming at describing the conceptual structure of our every-day experience - what processes underpin and constitute it. So it is a little confusing to think things like for the general person the life they live is theirs as being equivalent to the live Dasein lives is mine. On one level, this is restating the banality that when something happens to someone, it happens to them. On another, this 'stuff that happens happens to me' is a general feature of human experience, all the stuff that's ever happened as far as my life-world is concerned has involved me - that's just what it means for me to be personally involved in things. We're personally involved whenever we're involved. That second we're is in the ontological register that Dasein inhabits - as a generalised subjectivity, it must be present in us all just as much as each is personally involved.

You augment this conception with 'being-with', which Dasein is always, and you end up with something similar to the private-language argument operating in Heidegger's thought again. Even though everything we experience is a personal involvement, it's fundamentally social since intelligibility and sense are structures of the world we inhabit.

Yes, it can be confusing, but saying being-with is solipsistic is just like saying sociality is solipsistic.

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.

With a little less jargon, Heidegger's placed himself methodologically as describing an everyman, which he terms Dasein. Dasein is the name of the conceptual structure of human subjectivity. So while he's operating from a place that will give insights into one regime of commonalities of people - ontological structures and substructures - perhaps a case can be made that this circumscription of ontology necessarily elides the true alterity of ontical conditions and the role they play in subjectivity. Things like chronic diseases, long term relationships, heartbreak, political involvement, community etc. 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, but why is this a methodological problem rather than work Heidegger provided the prolegomena for (and many followed in his wake)?

The crux of the matter as I see it is that maybe the conceptual structure of these ontical conditions can only be grasped intellectually and upon reflection, thus as present at hand, but the ontical conditions' effects can be read comparatively into human subjectivity as an ontological feature - like Levinas does with the other and Merleau-Ponty does with the body.

fdrake,

Interesting post. Let me see if I understand you.

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...

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.

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.

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.

Am I understanding you?

One thing I would say to

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

is that your concern seems to apply more so to Dasein's lostness in the-they or Dasein's leaping-in than to Being-with as such. Being-with is Dasein's always-already a priori immersed engagement with Others in solicitous concern - the social understanding that co-constitutes Dasein's embeddedness - which makes possible my way of encountering or interpreting things, myself, people, etc as this or that. The fact that Dasein is for the most part inauthentic/fallen doesn't seem like it could tell us much about any of those ontical contexts other than "Dasein listens to what 'they' say", and so we are left wanting more. Though Being-with seems like it gives us enough of a general structure of Dasein's engagement to tell us something relevant/interesting about most ontical contexts. Not sure though.

Also, that, if I am understanding you correctly, is a problem I have with the Later Heidegger when he seems to explain all of the world's problem on the fact that we have forgotten Being. That definitely seems unsatisfying.

Might you have/know of a specific example that might more clearly explain why there is reason to believe that Being-with doesn't cut it? Really interesting.

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

I'm sure there are more than 3 ways to do it, but those 3 jumped out at me. The first two were things I've seen before on the internet, the last one is me wrestling with some discomfort I've grown to have with Heidegger's thought since I stopped seriously studying him.

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

Yeah, I think that's pretty close to what I intended with the first subargument. If you start an analysis of human being from the perspective of a knowing subject and known objects you end up missing a lot. So what I tried to do here is frame solipsism as arising from (what Heidegger thinks) is a Cartesian outlook on human being; as a subject with its 'internal' properties - seemings/sensations - and objects with their 'external' properties -density, luminescence, colour etc-. Then 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.

SEP has a very good exegesis of Heidegger's critique of Descartes here, but it might be more useful as a consolidation for someone who is already comfortable with the vocabulary. Its key quote is:

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)

The references I was making to the private language argument are really for @Banno, who is a big fan of Wittgenstein but thinks that Heidegger's phenomenology is solipsistic. I didn't develop the reference much, it was more of a signpost to mark that Heidegger's account of being-with is very consistent with the semantic externalism that comes from Wittgenstein's private language argument. And such externalism is a pretty good answer to solipsism - which minimally claims that 'it's all in the head'.

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

I think that's a good summary of the distinction between private and personal. That what's personal is still lit up upon a shared background is part of being-with. Whatever we do is always social, and the structures of the world are shared. Again, this has a symmetry with Wittgenstein's conceptions of rule following and externalist consequences of the private language argument:

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

which is from here. Being-with has a normative dimension which operates upon the background of shared meanings (linguistic or expressive patterns) and a shared structure of the world. This is why I tried to frame being-with as sociality outside of the Heidegger jargon. I thought that framing it as sociality would achieve three things:

(1) Everything about meaning occurs socially and comes with a normative component.
(2) Sociality occurs at the same time as we do stuff, even in the absence of others; it's a capacity we're always exercising.
(3) If we didn't have the potential to be social in this way, we wouldn't have any social phenomena to begin with.

(1) and (2) link it to the previously referenced semantic externalism, (3) goes a little deeper into the account and references the distinction between sense and intelligibility; we make sense of the world in the same sort of ways because we inhabit the same world and understand that world in the same sorts of ways.

So onto the final subargument, (3).

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 think of my third subargument as a kind of 'master criticism' of Heidegger that all my other discomforts with his metaphysics fall under. I think it is true that Heidegger passes over the richness of things which are 'merely ontic', but 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.

The story I'm trying to tell here is that there are some really glaring omissions from his phenomenology; there's the body, there's human development, there's parts of the everyday which have huge consequences for the understanding of human being like the workday and fatigue. These are incidental features in Heidegger's phenomenology; their specifities get absorbed by the features of facticity.

The workday, for example, is fundamentally a thrown-ness disclosed through varying dispositions rather than one of the biggest constraints on human activity with its own character. You can say the same about an illness - say broken legs, it'll change the phenomena which realise thrown-ness and projection but you won't notice that distances expand, it brings about conflict in your identity (say if you do sports) etc. This doesn't even begin to deal with the changes brought about in people's lives when they have kids, have chronic mental illness and so on.

The only way you're going to incorporate such things into the ontology of human being is through comparative accounts. You can't get at this stuff through raw formal indication and recursive interpretation - you have to treat people's bodies, moods, illnesses, lives as ontical experiments just as much as you posit human being in general as the subject for analysis to get at human being more thoroughly.

This is why I said such things can only be gotten at comparatively; the structural (ontic) ways human beings differ is just as important as their constitution ceteris paribus for the ontology of human being.

Being-with is not the condition for the possibility of Dasein. — Dan123

Yes, it is :)
This "with" has an instrumental character.

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

I think the solipsist could say that 1) is actually a misrepresentation on your part. I think they could say that your critique of 1), ultimately, misses the point. The solipsist could say he can overcome 1). To do so, he could grant that, yes, Dasein is not a present-at-hand entity; Dasein is fundamentally not an inner, mental I-Thing containing categorical properties such as sensation-al representations or mental pictures that may or may not correspond to objective, property-laden, present-at-hand objects on the 'outside.' The solipsist can admit that, yes, Dasein is worldy, Dasein is existence, Dasein is a being in-the-world, Dasein is thrown into context, Dasein is for the most part absorbed through skills and knowing-how, Dasein for the most part encounters equipment and dwells in a with-world, Dasein is temporal, Dasein does not first "have to give shape to the swirl of sensations" in order to "leap off and finally arrive at a 'world', and so on. The solipsist can admit "yes, Heidegger is not a Cartesian solipsist - Heidegger is not denying the existence of any substance that is not me - but, he is a solipsist insofar as the entities encountered, the world itself, and the "transcendental generality" that constitutes the structure of the ways I understand and navigate my lifeworld is not only always-already 'in terms of my concerns and goals', but given to or constitutive of the Being of the entity that I am and only of the entity that I am. The Others I encounter are not in-themselves-other-Dasein, they are projected from me and by me, and as such, given to me alone. Ergo, not "to be is to be perceived" but 'to be' is 'to enter within the range of the intelligibility that I - as a finite, temporal, world-embedded disclosure - essentially am'. So, on this idealist (more so than solipsist) interpretation, one avoids falling into the subject-object relation/Cartesian representationalism/an ontology of the present-at-hand while precluding the possibility of the 'existence' of any other Dasein that either transcends the horizon of my intelligibility, dwells within my horizon, or co-constitutes the horizon to which I belong to and essentially am.

^This way of avoiding your critique is not overcome by turning to 2), I think. The fact that I am always-already involved in anything and everything that I am always-already involved in - the fact the world is always-already a world for-me or 'in terms of myself in one way or another' - does not, on its own, entail solipsism or idealism. One must take the additional step to say that 'the Others encountered within-the-world are not Other Dasein: they are subjective manifestations ultimately reducible to myself' which would mean that 'Being-with is merely the structure of how I relate and understand social relations but not how I access or relate to other real people." But this additional step is what is already presupposed by the solipsist's/idealist's argument in the preceding paragraph. Does it have a slight Cartesian flavor to it? - maybe I'm not sure. Though I am not sure you can just right that critique off by saying it's grounded in the subject-object relation and use that as a trump card to reject it, since it accepts most (and enough) of the non-present-at-hand-ness of what Heidegger is arguing for.

So, I think, the only way to really take down the solipsist/idealist is to say both that the entities encountered within-the-world are not subjectively constructed phenomena and that Being-in-the-world itself is not a 'projected-by-me-and-only-me meaning making capacity or activity.' You have to say that the entities in the world are the things-themselves disclosed to me but not reducible to me. I can only access, grasp, or make sense of that which discursively and hermeneutically enters within the range of the socially-shared world to which I constitutively belong. The world is public, literally co-constituted by multiple Dasein's who are each immersed in the world. That which does not enter within the range of the world to which I belong and the possibilities that I understand in terms of is not accessible to me and as such remains "hidden" or "concealed". Being always exceeds my grasp. Being-with is my always-already immersion in a co-opened or public world. So, a
strand of non-Cartesian, interpretive realism. I think.

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

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.

^Though I think I see your point. It would take a more refined and detailed analysis which could include comparing different contexts to illuminate their meaning in order to examine whether or not they should be included in the fundamental analysis of what it is to be human. The crux is that you would have to show why what Heidegger considers ontic is actually ontological - constitutive of Dasein's disclosedness itself. Seems like we'd need to more about a method - comparative or not - for doing this. Good stuff though.

I think the following quote provides some evidence for my interpretation of the relation between Dasein and other Dasein.

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.)

As for you Heiko,

In Being and Time, Heidegger says

"Dasein in itself is essentially Being-with."
"Being-with is an existential characteristic of Dasein"
"Being missing and ‘Being away’ are modes of Dasein-with, and are possible only because Dasein as Being-with lets the Dasein of Others be encountered in its world."
"Being-with is in every case a characteristic of one’s own Dasein;"
"Being-with, like concern, is a Being towards entities encountered within-the-world...These entities are not objects of concern, but rather of solicitude... Solicitude proves to be a state of Dasein’s Being."
"Being-in is Being-with... Dasein’s ownmost meaning of Being is such that this entity (which has been freed environmentally) is Being-in."
"So far as Dasein is at all, it has Being-with-one-another as its kind of Being."

Checkmate.

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. But I'll use that you picked up on the theme to give some more elaboration of my point.

What I already wrote:

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

You played the agglomerative part out exactly here:

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.

This is pretty much what I'm pointing out. When you have a how question, the Heideggerian response is to immediately to give its transcendental preconditions without batting an eyelid on the more mechanistic/procedural aspects of the question. If you will allow a change in vocabulary, I think of it like: saying that X is grounded in Y is saying that Y is (a) condition of possibility for X (or that they are co-primordial). But! 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. Heidegger, and Heideggerian analysis, very rarely actually does this.

So, a question like - how does a broken leg impact a person's life? It's answered just like you did: we've already taken this into account with the thrown-ness/disposition couple. Ontologically sure, Heidegger's doing the job as he sees it well - ontically that's just saying 'a person's got a broken leg and it effects them somehow'. The epoche Heidegger performs on the ontic makes it very difficult to ask this kind of question.

Maybe the epoche is fine, but the recursive exposition (hermeneutic spiral/circle) he does needs to permit of taking comparatives or ontic differences as a theme, which is a bit of a change from the 'first philosophy' feel of pre-turn Heidegger.

And asking this kind of question is really important, it opens up questions of comparative differences in Daseins - for example, people with broken legs or chronic mobility issues evaluate distances differently from those who are closer to the every-day Dasein. Is this a mere ontical difference, or does the fact that human senses of spatiality differ over individuals highlight a weakness in dealing with humanity only as far as the analysis of a strictly generic individual (which never actually exists)?

The thinking of being is just as much the thinking of beings as of being alone.

Or, just for shits and giggles: Being being beings is being being.

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

I understand that you are criticizing Heidegger's transcendentalism. I get that. By writing what I wrote there, I did not mean to say that your critique neither understands Heidegger's way of grounding the phenomena nor anticipates a transcendental rebuttal; it clearly does: Heidegger's transcendental arguments are the very thing you are reacting to. My reason for briefly articulating an example of how Heidegger grounds the phenomena was to more-explicitly present the standard general way Heidegger's transcendental account is applied to different ontic examples. I did this in order to briefly highlight some of the specific transcendental arguments that your critique would specifically have to deal with in order to overcome Heidegger's transcendental grounding. I got that you probably already understood this, I just wanted to make it a little more explicit in order to bring it to the fore of the conversation. Make sense? So I wasn't pushing back against your critique at all. Though I see how it might have seemed that I was.

However, now after reading your last post, I will push back, though really only for the purposes of gaining clarity and getting more straighten out.

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

I think you right here: the formal ontological conditions of ontical contexts cannot give us an explanation of an understanding/explanation of ontical contexts. So I agree with you when you say "the formal character of [insert existentiale or structure of Dasein's Being here] does little to facilitate the understanding of [insert ontical context here]." I mean, of course. But nobody claims that, for example, "the formal character of facticity tells us something about the understanding of how the workday effects people." That's why it's a formal structure of Dasein's Being. Throwness, fallenness, projection etc. are the general conditions. They are formal indicators of things more specific. That which a formal indicator (such as projection) is standing-in-for is, at least for Heidegger, what explains/conditionalizes anything ontical. So when you say

The analysis of Being and Time agglomerates the specifics of these things to their general constitution — fdrake

my response is, no it doesn't. Aren't you skipping over existetiell possibilities, specific moods, particular involvement structures, etc? Heidegger isn't saying "The general structure of Dasein's Being itself can adequately facilitate an understanding of the ontic." Of course there is more specificity to understanding particular ontic contexts: one lives their life in terms of specific possibilities, one is thrown in a specific world, things are disclosed through particular ways of understanding, existential space is configured in particular ways etc. Heidegger understands this. So, yes if

Y is (a) condition of possibility for X — fdrake

, then

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

But not when Y is the general structure.

But it seems that your argument misses this point, I think.

So when I said

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.

I did not mean to say that "broken-legs can be understood merely through understanding the general structure of what it is to be Dasein." Heidegger would not say that either. I have to be concernfully engaged comporting myself towards the future in specific ways within a specific milieu of meaning in order to open up a space such that my broken-leg as my broken-leg is disclosed. So there is a specific story that has to filled in here that the general structure alone can't provide us, and Heidegger recognizes that. What am I missing here?

Maybe I'm missing your point completely: maybe your point is this:
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.

Though, doesn't Heidegger's talk of the hermeneutical situation and the fore-structures of understanding fill that role?

Or are you saying that even if we knew that specificity, we still wouldn't be able to account for certain ontical contexts, such as "how a broken leg affects one's life"?

Am I understanding you?

Also, Are most people on this forum grad students/philosophy students/professors, etc? People who just enjoy philosophy? Both?

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

I think this is close to what I meant, but articulated much better. I'll try and build on it. But at a later date. This is fun, thanks. :)

Also, Are most people on this forum grad students/philosophy students/professors, etc? People who just enjoy philosophy? Both? — Dan123

There's a mix. Most of the long term members have been studying philosophy as a hobby for a long time, AFAIK practicing philosophers are pretty rare on here. But also AFAIK there are quite a lot of people who studied philosophy, at least a little, at university. If you're interested in Heidegger or Wittgenstein people here are generally motivated to discuss and quite well informed on either or both - you just happened to strike upon an interest in Heidegger scholarship shared by a fair few regular members.