Looking for propositional content as the basis of all thought/belief is looking through the clouded lens of an utterly inadequate criterion. — creativesoul
Yes. I would credit Heiddy with the very same thing that I credit Witt for... how's that for a surprising grouping? — creativesoul
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
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
Semantic holism...
Explain a bit?
Insert pleading hands... — creativesoul
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
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
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
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
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
Did Heidegger eventually conclude that Witt was right? 'Whereof one cannot speak...' I thought maybe he did. — frank
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If we wanted to focus on the "pre-theoretical," we certainly wouldn't (need to) read Heidegger. — Terrapin Station
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
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 anyoen is doing, etc.) — Terrapin Station
that already shows that the strict subject/object distinction is a fiction. — macrosoft
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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
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. — macrosoft
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 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
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