Looking for propositional content as the basis of all thought/belief is looking through the clouded lens of an utterly inadequate criterion. — creativesoul

I can't comment much on OC yet, but I do agree with the statement above. Hinge propositions are too conscious, too explicit.

After finishing Groundless Grounds, I have the impression of WIttgenstein realizing that language is a system. It stands or falls as a system. He speaks of holding a set of propositions up to reality, and not any single proposition. This too is still too explicit. I have been contemplating knowledge, which I associate with Witt and Heid. When I reach for my coffee, I don't know that I have hands. I know it.

Knowing is acting with automatic faith, with a sort of basic animal know-how and trust. Our bright and shiny theoretical edifice of explicit propositions is a candle floating on an ocean. The ground is obscure. Our artificial/theoretical grounds constantly appeal to this obscure ground, mostly without knowing it. We speak what is with a sense that what is is not only for us. We can speak about private feelings, but we still speak as if these feelings are located in some hidden way in the same world with the listener.

Yes. I would credit Heiddy with the very same thing that I credit Witt for... how's that for a surprising grouping? — creativesoul

I might be more surprised, but they are Lee Braver's favorite philosophers, and he wrote a first-rate book about what they had in common. Highly recommended.

Not much else to add...

It seems that there may be a bit of indirect perception bubbling forth... that is to conflate physiological sensory perception and thought/belief by virtue of talking about perception as if it is informed by language.

Semantic holism...

Explain a bit?

Insert pleading hands...

It seems that there may be a bit of indirect perception bubbling forth... that is to conflate physiological sensory perception and thought/belief by virtue of talking about perception as if it is informed by language. — creativesoul

Is there a strict boundary? I'm not so sure there is. Given semantic holism as I understand, none of our supposed-to-be explicit categories cut very sharply. This is examined by Braver. We inherited the notion (at least from Kant) of some kind of automatic unifying of pure concept and pure sensation. But this is just a model. It sounds nice and clean, but...

This is one of the more gripping and convincing insights in Heidegger, I think. All he does is notice and describe. Its truth (or not) is up to you to check against your memory.

Readiness-to-hand has a distinctive phenomenological signature. While engaged in hitch-free skilled activity, Dasein has no conscious experience of the items of equipment in use as independent objects (i.e., as the bearers of determinate properties that exist independently of the Dasein-centred context of action in which the equipmental entity is involved). Thus, while engaged in trouble-free hammering, the skilled carpenter has no conscious recognition of the hammer, the nails, or the work-bench, in the way that one would if one simply stood back and thought about them. Tools-in-use become phenomenologically transparent. Moreover, Heidegger claims, not only are the hammer, nails, and work-bench in this way not part of the engaged carpenter's phenomenal world, neither, in a sense, is the carpenter. The carpenter becomes absorbed in his activity in such a way that he has no awareness of himself as a subject over and against a world of objects. Crucially, it does not follow from this analysis that Dasein's behaviour in such contexts is automatic, in the sense of there being no awareness present at all, but rather that the awareness that is present (what Heidegger calls circumspection) is non-subject-object in form. Phenomenologically speaking, then, there are no subjects and no objects; there is only the experience of the ongoing task (e.g., hammering).

Heidegger, then, denies that the categories of subject and object characterize our most basic way of encountering entities. He maintains, however, that they apply to a derivative kind of encounter. When Dasein engages in, for example, the practices of natural science, when sensing takes place purely in the service of reflective or philosophical contemplation, or when philosophers claim to have identified certain context-free metaphysical building blocks of the universe (e.g., points of pure extension, monads), the entities under study are phenomenologically removed from the settings of everyday equipmental practice and are thereby revealed as fully fledged independent objects, that is, as the bearers of certain context-general determinate or measurable properties (size in metres, weight in kilos etc.). Heidegger calls this mode of Being presence-at-hand, and he sometimes refers to present-at-hand entities as ‘Things’. With this phenomenological transformation in the mode of Being of entities comes a corresponding transformation in the mode of Being of Dasein. Dasein becomes a subject, one whose project is to explain and predict the behaviour of an independent, objective universe. Encounters with the present-at-hand are thus fundamentally subject-object in structure. — SEP

So I'm thinking we tend to while in the theoretical mode take this occasional mode as an image of thinking in general. As philosophers, we learn to operated intensely in this mode and to speak to others intensely in this mode. Everything is known and nothing is known. With thinkers like Heidegger, we remember and then know that we also know.

Semantic holism...

Explain a bit?

Insert pleading hands... — creativesoul

I'll give you an example. Just track your own reading below. Try to watch the flow of concept.

Of this sentence the meaning you expect.

Its end is known, finally, to refer to its beginning

That would be the temporal aspect. I think we naturally have this notion of instantaneous meaning. We see the sentence in our visual field all at once. It is a point on the continuum of clock time, physics time. But really there is a forward movement of expectation and a backward movement of memory or trace. The meaning of the individual words is not even constant during our reading of a single sentence. They are temporally entangled. Atomic meaning is an idealizing abstraction, useful at times, but misleading.

If the real is the constantly present, then we ourselves are not real. There is no time for thinking in eternity, no room for a single living thought. If language is what is fundamentally human, then humans are fundamentally in time and cannot be eternal. This can be read as the ineluctable mortality of meaning. It lives its death as future.

There is also the dictionary problem. One word is defined in terms of others. And these others are still defined in terms of others. All a dictionary can do is aid someone who is already partially 'inside' a language. Correct usage is tested against how people treat us in response. There is no obvious connection to pure meaning. I do not in the least doubt the consciousness of meaning, but I think it is more of a flow with feedback and projection. The meaning is like electrons running through a string of words as their wire. Individual words just stared at do have some meaning. Or we can quickly fish for some by coming up with typical uses. But every serious thinking is immensely complex in the way that meaning rushes through it with memory and expectation. The very complexity involved in our background linguistic know-how outstrips the complexity of the thoughts so delivered. Explicit systems are sad little shadows of that which makes them possible in terms of sophistication.

I speculate that our phonetic alphabet and the spaces between words are misleading. Our dominant visual sense (which takes static objects as its ideal object) encourages us to 'visualize' thinking and meaning, despite their more plausible connection to the temporality of music/hearing.

Another motive that holds atomic meaning fast (as a default semi-automatic approach to be dismantled) is the common project of making a knock-down argument --often for the projection of authority. We need atomic meaning, as stable as possible, to do 'math' with words and build explicit metaphysical/epistemological systems. So our fear of groundlessness (or of just relying on the inexplicit ground we started with) also encourages an ignorance of a semantic holism that might otherwise be obvious.

Sometimes what is needed is the ability to change a flat tire on the highway. From this ordinary life perspective, Heidegger's grandiosity, for instance, is a rubber bullet. 'Speculative' thought is the world turned upside down. — macrosoft

Just to be clear, I'm not really trying to set up a distinction between philosophy and ordinary life ('changing a tire'). I'm interested rather in a distinction between two approaches to philosophy itself. When I speak of the need to attend to the asymmetry of the our relationship to the world, by this I mean a properly philosophical attention, and not some naive 'immersed in a life world', pre-theoretical kind of deal. I mean to attend to this precisely at the level of the theoretical. One way to think about this, with respect to Heidegger, is to challenge his account of the role of death in the analytic of Dasein, which you nicely outlined here:

The death theme is important. There's no time to figure it all out the right way. The future roars with too many possibilities. They can't all be claimed or explored. And then some fundamental assumptions just have to be grasped, as risk understood to be risk. That's one way to understand resoluteness. A person groundlessly chooses and makes the best of it, with no Universal Time-safe Entity to insure that leap. — macrosoft

The question is this: can death play the existentially orienting role which Heidegger wants it to? It has often been suggested - and I agree with this suggestion - that it cannot. The problem is that the possibility of death is far more diffuse and evanescent than Heidegger makes it out to be: death is not merely some future possibility that awaits at some always differed point 'down the track' (death qua 'possibility of impossibility'); rather, the possibility of the death is, as it were, contemporaneous with Dasein at every point:

"Death is imminent at every moment. it is not a moment that lies ahead of the succession of moments before me, it is an event immanent in every event. The last moment may be the next moment. The contingency of the being that is promised in the moment is its possible impossibility. Death is everywhere in the environment; every step I take may plunge me into the abyss, every objective that offers itself to my reach may be the ambush from which there will be no advance and no return. The location and the approach of death cannot be surveyed across the line and distance of the future ... Death which has no front lines cannot be confronted. lt cannot fix a direction" (Alphonso Lingis, Sensation, my bolding).

I quote Lingis but this point has long been made by others, including and especially by Blanchot, who has often riffed on the impersonality of death, and its disoreinting and de-temporalizing power: death as what interrupts, and not (only) what orients. The upshot of this, to link it back to my hesitation about holism, is to 'fragment' death so it is not longer just some single, distant point toward which Dasein is oriented, but something pluralized and dispersed in a way which enables multiple and even clashing orientations and possibly disorientations. To de-idealize and de-singularize death such that we occupy not a single, coherent and unified current of 'timing' (a verb, as you put it), but multiple, overlapping, confusing, timings (and untimings, even). Death in Heidegger plays far too much of a role in 'smoothing over' the tumult that more properly characterizes the trajectory or trajectories which characterize Dasein.

Another way to put this is that it's necessary to shatter the rigidity of the so-called 'fundamental structure of Dasein' whose explication is one of the main drivers of B&T. 'Structure' is one of those terms that saturates B&T, and which has not been given enough attention because people are generally too interested in the more inventive neologisms that Heidi peppers the work with. But 'structure' in B&T is just as important a term as 'being-toward-death' or 'care' or any other well-known Heideggerianisms. For me at least, the importance of this term lies in how its frequency demonstrates just how formalist and ossified the whole analytic of Dasein is in B&T.

This is one of the reasons why I much prefer - following Arendt - to emphasize not death but natality - beginnings and births, not ends - as a far more interesting philosophical theme. The broodiness of Heidegger is not accidental but in fact very much in keeping with his philosophy. So, to bring this all back to the OP, I'm not drawing a distinction between the 'intoxicating', 'exhausting' efforts of capital-P Philosophy qua dark, introspective discipline and 'everyday life', but rather, looking at ways to inject the (sometimes) aerialities and lightness of the latter into the former. It's a question of philosophy all the way through. Speculative thought doesn't have to be the world turned upside down. It can instead be - to quote Elizabeth Grosz - an effort to "enlarge the universe by enabling its potential to be otherwise, to be framed through concepts and affects. [To be] among the most forceful ways in which culture generates a small space of chaos within chaos where chaos can be elaborated, felt, thought".

Philosophy augments, extends, and edifies. It is not pale imitation and inadequate 'proximating'.

But the notion of experience turning back interpretively on itself in very much in Hegel, along with an attainment of the self-consciousness of this process. Heidegger's work would be one more piece of that self-consciousness. — macrosoft

And the basic insight is Platonic. Maybe perennial?

If we wanted to focus on the "pre-theoretical," we certainly wouldn't (need to) read Heidegger.

Heidegger's work would be one more piece of that self-consciousness. — macrosoft

Did Heidegger eventually conclude that Witt was right? 'Whereof one cannot speak...' I thought maybe he did.

I'm no scholar, but my understanding is that one can just start with 'dasein' as individual human 'existence.' I often translate in my mind as I read to see what feels right. Sometimes it's being-there or being-here. In short you are dasein, I am dasein. — macrosoft

If that is the case then why didn’t Heidegger just say so? I’ve asked MANY people to show me where he says this explicitly - no one has managed to do so to date.

Another problem is that this doesn’t mean anything:

What is this separation of words from thought, though? To me it seems that our thoughts only exist as words embedded in history. The realm outside of time seems to be exactly what Heidegger is breaking down. The future is roaring and screaming. We are the thrown open space in which it roars and screams. But we can also just get immersed in ordinarily life, forgetting our groundlessness/open-ness to this future as possibility, not as not-yet-present event on the time-line. — macrosoft

Thoughts don’t necessarily have to be “worded.” The realm outside of time is known how exactly? It isn’t.

He termed what he was doing as Hermeneutic Phenomenology - the term “hermeneutic” comes from the interpretation of scripture (words written.) Of course he mentions Husserl’s phenomenological idea but he only pays attention to one aspect of the whole as far as I can tell.

Did Heidegger eventually conclude that Witt was right? 'Whereof one cannot speak...' I thought maybe he did. — frank

I don't know. Accordingly Rorty, Heidegger was trying to leave the power play of metaphysics behind in his later work. I've mostly studied his 1920s stuff. It looks like he's doing a Kantian-type thing in Being and Time. I just got his Logic (last lecture series before B & T), and this (translated by in a friendly English by Sheehan) is a detailed examination of Kant and others. He tries to show where Kant was there and yet held back by Cartesian presuppositions. At this point he was still doing 'pre-science' and aiming at a universal truth about human experience. Kisiel suggests that he abandoned this project as still too metaphysical and returned to KNS 1919 ideas (more along what you are talking about --life cannot be finally grasped.)

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If we wanted to focus on the "pre-theoretical," we certainly wouldn't (need to) read Heidegger. — Terrapin Station

I think you are missing the point. The theoretical mind has taken itself for consciousness itself, despite being a derivative mode. Heidegger is himself in the theoretical mode as he brings the pre-theoretical mode to explicit consciousness.

Have you read "What is Metaphysics?" I read it recently and loved it.

If that is the case then why didn’t Heidegger just say so? I’ve asked MANY people to show me where he says this explicitly - no one has managed to do so to date. — I like sushi

This entity which each of us is himself…we shall denote by the term “Dasein”" (Heidegger, trans. 1927/1962, p.27).[4]

The concept of Dasein
For Heidegger, the human subject had to be reconceived in an altogether new way, as “being-in-the-world.” Because this notion represented the very opposite of the Cartesian “thing that thinks,” the idea of consciousness as representing the mind’s internal awareness of its own states had to be dropped. With it went the assumption that specific mental states were needed to mediate the relation of the mind to everything outside it. The human subject was not a mind that was capable only of representing the world to itself and whose linkage with its body was merely a contingent one. According to Heidegger, human being should instead be conceived as Dasein, a common German word usually translated in English as “existence” but which also literally means “being there.” By using it as a replacement for “consciousness” and “mind,” Heidegger intended to suggest that a human being is in the world in the mode of “uncovering” and is thus disclosing other entities as well as itself. Dasein is, in other words, the “there”—or the locus—of being and thus the metaphorical place where entities “show themselves” as what they are. Instead of being sealed off within a specially designed compartment within a human being, the functions that have been misdescribed as “mental” now become the defining characteristics of human existence. — Enc Brit

The foregoing considerations bring an important question to the fore: what, according to Heidegger, is so special about human beings as such? Here there are broadly speaking two routes that one might take through the text of Being and Time. The first unfolds as follows. If we look around at beings in general—from particles to planets, ants to apes—it is human beings alone who are able to encounter the question of what it means to be (e.g., in moments of anxiety in which the world can appear meaning-less, more on which later). More specifically, it is human beings alone who (a) operate in their everyday activities with an understanding of Being (although, as we shall see, one which is pre-ontological, in that it is implicit and vague) and (b) are able to reflect upon what it means to be. This gives us a way of understanding statements such as “Dasein is ontically distinguished by the fact that, in its very Being, that Being is an issue for it” (Being and Time 4: 32). Mulhall, who tends to pursue this way of characterizing Dasein, develops the idea by explaining that while inanimate objects merely persist through time and while plants and non-human animals have their lives determined entirely by the demands of survival and reproduction, human beings lead their lives (Mulhall 2005, 15). In terms of its deep ontological structure, although not typically in terms of how it presents itself to the individual in consciousness, each moment in a human life constitutes a kind of branch-point at which a person ‘chooses’ a kind of life, a possible way to be. It is crucial to emphasize that one may, in the relevant sense, ‘choose’ an existing path simply by continuing unthinkingly along it, since in principle at least, and within certain limits, one always had, and still has, the capacity to take a different path. (This gives us a sense of human freedom, one that will be unpacked more carefully below.) This can all sound terribly inward-looking, but that is not Heidegger's intention. In a way that is about to become clearer, Dasein's projects and possibilities are essentially bound up with the ways in which other entities may become intelligible. Moreover, terms such as ‘lead’ and ‘choose’ must be interpreted in the light of Heidegger's account of care as the Being of Dasein (see later), an account that blunts any temptation to hear these terms in a manner that suggests inner deliberation or planning on the part of a reflective subject. (So perhaps Mulhall's point that human beings are distinctive in that they lead their lives would be better expressed as the observation that human beings are the nuclei of lives laying themselves out.)

The second route to an understanding of Dasein, and thus of what is special about human beings as such, emphasizes the link with the taking-as structure highlighted earlier. Sheehan (2001) develops just such a line of exegesis by combining two insights. The first is that the ‘Da’ of Da-sein may be profitably translated not as ‘there’ but as ‘open’. This openness is in turn to be understood as ‘the possibility of taking-as’ and thus as a preintellectual openness to Being that is necessary for us to encounter beings as beings in particular ways (e.g., practically, theoretically, aesthetically). Whether or not the standard translation of ‘Da’ as ‘there’ is incapable of doing justice to this idea is moot—one might express the same view by saying that to be Dasein is to be there, in the midst of entities making sense a certain way. Nevertheless, the term ‘openness’ does seem to provide a nicely graphic expression of the phenomenon in question. Sheehan's second insight, driven by a comment of Heidegger's in the Zollikon seminars to the effect that the verbal emphasis in ‘Da-sein’ is to be placed on the second syllable, is that the ‘sein’ of ‘Da-sein’ should be heard as ‘having-to-be’, in contrast with ‘occasionally or contingently is’. These dual insights lead to a characterization of Dasein as the having-to-be-open. In other words, Dasein (and so human beings as such) cannot but be open: it is a necessary characteristic of human beings (an a priori structure of our existential constitution, not an exercise of our wills) that we operate with the sense-making capacity to take-other-beings-as. — SEP

The theoretical mind has taken itself for consciousness itself, — macrosoft

What would be evidence of that? (Rather than just being something like a straw man claim, a severe misunderstanding of what anyone is doing, etc.)

Have you read "What is Metaphysics?" I read it recently and loved it. — frank

Yes, I love it too.

All of that post where you're quoting Encyclopedia Britannica and SEP about Dasein strikes me as Heidegger saying something both very trivial and very confused--the latter exacerbated by saying something very trivial in the most tortured way possible--in response to a complete misunderstanding (so a straw man) of what anyone else had been claiming.

What would be evidence of that? (Rather than just being something like a straw man claim, a severe misunderstanding of what anyoen is doing, etc.) — Terrapin Station

That is what you can find in Heidegger. If you contemplate ready-to-hand-ness (we become the hammering), that already shows that the strict subject/object distinction is a fiction. But my primary answer would be to actually read the first draft of Being and Time (100 pages.) Or Richard Polt's book is written in a style I think you'll like.

This reminds me of you asking for a summary of Hegel as I understood him.

Something I wrote in another thread:

No, I'm not saying that. It's like my 14 year old nihilist example. (I talked about how the merely conscious rejection of presuppositions was trivial.) Anything explicitly conscious is still on the level of theory. It's the stuff that dominates in the background that matters. It's the water we swim in that we can't see. This water-we-can't-see is the 'living' past (one aspect of it.) It is the way you reach for your instrument, your way and not someone else's, informed by years of experience. It's the way you read these words right now, the way you unconsciously interpret them, the way that you (like all of us) are trapped in certain habits of interpretation, ultimately learned not only from your personal past but that which you inherited as a child and even further back in the creation of the English language. It's all of this stuff functioning invisibly as you dream up a future and act toward it in the 'present;. [The thrown-ness that you know about consciously is the least important kind, let's say.]

Heidegger is a 'depth' meta-physician. He is trying to get 'under' things that can be argued about to see what makes them visible or invisible as things to argue about. For instance, to the degree that this is making sense to you I am 'opening' new things for us to talk about --hopefully pointing to things already in the background of your consciousness, covered over by louder explicit theory that gets in the way.

Heidegger thought that anyone was saying that humans weren't "being there," weren't "in the world"? He thought that anyone was saying that we were in some "sealed-off compartment"? He thought that anyone was saying that there's only a theoretical mode to being/to consciousness? He thought that noting that we can make decisions about our lives was some sort of insight?

It's difficult to believe that he would have thought any of that.

that already shows that the strict subject/object distinction is a fiction. — macrosoft

All it's really saying is that you don't always have the distinction in mind. Well, duh! Who would have thought that anyone was saying that we did always have the distinction in mind?

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Heidegger thought that anyone was saying that humans weren't "being there," weren't "in the world"? He thought that anyone was saying that we were in some "sealed-off compartment"? He thought that anyone was saying that there's only a theoretical mode to being/to consciousness? He thought that noting that we can make decisions about our lives was some sort of insight?

It's difficult to believe that he would have thought any of that. — Terrapin Station

No, Anyone is immersed in practical life. He did think metaphysicians were trapped in Cartesian presuppositions. We can think of this as a kind of professionalized Anyone (the concepts are related via 'idle talk') (If I had online texts of his early stuff, I'd give you more quotes.)

Selecting pieces of what he said doesn’t hold up. Does he also define “dasein” in a different way? I ask knowing the answer to be yes btw.

Eric Brit - It wasn’t a “new way” it was Husserl’s way, the principle of phenomenology. The rest is nothing more than word play.

Like I’ve said, I don’t really care much for other people’s interpretations of Heidegger. I want his words used to express what he said. He used “dasein” as a placeholder for “I don’t know, but I’m going to take a bery long time saying ‘I don’t know’ and make it look like I know something.”

To be fair he did use some quite creative language and some pretty good analogies - useful for exposing other people to Husserl’s intent. In this respect Husserl was big picture and Heidegger was small picture thier approaches.

A person who studies snails all their life learn a lot about more than just snails. Those that study everything else and how things connect together also learn a lot. Heidegger “studied snails.”

All it's really saying is that you don't always have the distinction in mind. Well, duh! Who would have thoguht that anyone was saying that we did always have the distinction in mind? — Terrapin Station

You'll just have to look into more with sincere open-ness or pat yourself on the back for not being taken in. AFIK, you also think Nietzsche sucks. I'm pretty sure you think Hegel sucks, too. This is like being asked to prove that Jimi Hendrix was a good guitarist without being aloud to play the music. I must have used ye old Hegel line 4 times by now. The result without its becoming is always empty. The atomic/analytic approach is locked into doing math with words, assuming that some proposition out of context can beam them up to instant comprehension.

You'll just have to look into more with sincere open-ness or pat yourself on the back for not being taken in. AFIK, you also think Nietzsche sucks. I'm pretty sure you think Hegel sucks, too. This is like being asked to prove that Jimi Hendrix was a good guitarist without being aloud to play the music. I must have used ye old Hegel line 4 times by now. The result without its becoming is always empty. The atomic/analytic approach is locked into doing math with words, assuming that some proposition out of context can beam them up to instant comprehension. — macrosoft

I even think Russell sucks sometimes, and he's by far my favorite philosopher--or at least my favorite philosopher-as-author. The theory of descriptions, for example--what a stupid, ridiculously fussy/rococo way to try to deal with fictions, just because of the misguided desire to avoid psychologism (stemming from Russell's fascination with Frege).

I quote Lingis but this point has long been made by others, including and especially by Blanchot, who has often riffed on the impersonality of death, and its disoreinting and de-temporalizing power: death as what interrupts, and not (only) what orients. The upshot of this, to link it back to my hesitation about holism, is to 'fragment' death so it is not longer just some single, distant point toward which Dasein is oriented, but something pluralized and dispersed in a way which enables multiple and even clashing orientations and possibly disorientations. To de-idealize and de-singularize death such that we occupy not a single, coherent and unified current of 'timing' (a verb, as you put it), but multiple, overlapping, confusing, timings (and untimings, even). Death in Heidegger plays far too much of a role in 'smoothing over' the tumult that more properly characterizes the trajectory or trajectories which characterize Dasein. — StreetlightX

I like what you've written, but I think I've interpreted death differently (perhaps a misreading.) If death (as possibility at every moment and not some future event) opens the genuine future, it rips open the timeline and shreds it into a welter of possibilities. For me this would be like clashing orientations and associated disorientations. To experience a stable orientation would be to make the future present in the form of waiting for its already determinate form. As I read him, death reveals us as essentially possibility in a dizzying way. The 'pastness' theme seems important too. We can already image ourselves dead in a way that allows us to grasp our lives as a completed story. And we can author that story within the constraints of our thrown-ness.

I quote Lingis but this point has long been made by others, including and especially by Blanchot, who has often riffed on the impersonality of death, and its disoreinting and de-temporalizing power: death as what interrupts, and not (only) what orients. The upshot of this, to link it back to my hesitation about holism, is to 'fragment' death so it is not longer just some single, distant point toward which Dasein is oriented, but something pluralized and dispersed in a way which enables multiple and even clashing orientations and possibly disorientations. To de-idealize and de-singularize death such that we occupy not a single, coherent and unified current of 'timing' (a verb, as you put it), but multiple, overlapping, confusing, timings (and untimings, even). Death in Heidegger plays far too much of a role in 'smoothing over' the tumult that more properly characterizes the trajectory or trajectories which characterize Dasein. — StreetlightX


I like what you've written, but I think I've interpreted death differently (perhaps a misreading.) If death (as possibility at every moment and not some future event) opens the genuine future, it rips open the timeline and shreds it into a welter of possibilities. For me this would be like clashing orientations and associated disorientations. To experience a stable orientation would be to make the future present in the form of waiting for its already determinate form. As I read him, death reveals us as essentially possibility in a dizzying way. The 'pastness' theme seems important too. We can already image ourselves dead in a way that allows us to grasp our lives as a completed story. And we can author that story within the constraints of our thrown-ness. — macrosoft

I take it that's all talking about the contemplation of death, and not death per se?

The stuff that Streetlight wrote is a great example of the folly of taking meaning to be communal rather than personal. For example, "death, and its disorienting and detemporalizing power, death as what interrupts . . . " Those would be particular interpretations, particular ways of thinking about death, and they'd only obtain insofar as some particular individual(s) are thinking about it that way.

To try to say that the contemplation of death is disorienting and detemporalizing and interrupting, etc. to Joe (or alternately to no one in particular), when Joe doesn't think about it that way, is pretty disrespectful to Joe, pretty arrogant on the part of the person who is insisting on the interpretations in question. And in some similar cases--again, when the topic is stuff like racism, sexism, etc.--these sorts of mistakes can turn out to have serious (and in my opinion very immoral) practical upshots for someone.