Just between you and me, authenticity and death are two foci of analysis in Being and Time that lead to confusion and, as far I’m concerned, can be removed without losing much from the heart of the work. — Joshs
Tables and rivers are beings. In that respect, they do indeed share a commonality: being. — Xtrix
My presence on this thread is indicative of how unsettling I find Heidegger. I don't know what to do with him. There are those such as yourself who find his writing enlightening. To me it vacillates between being pretentious and being wrong. — Banno
But I haven't referred to Heidi's anti-Semitism. You brought that up. Why defend him to me for his bigotry? — Ciceronianus
What is there to gain from a historical-biographical analysis? The basic facts of his history can be obtained easily enough. I don't think he was a villain in any case. — Ciceronianus
I wonder how his Jewish best friends would feel about him if they had the opportunity to read his Black Notebooks. — Ciceronianus
Just between you and me, authenticity and death are two foci of analysis in Being and Time that lead to confusion and, as far I’m concerned, can be removed without losing much from the heart of the work.
— Joshs
I don't agree with this. I think those ideas are central to Being and Time. They may lead to confusion in some readers, but they certainly don't inevitably. — Janus
Furthermore, living beings embody the dynamic nature of being - the fact that it's a verb - more so than minerals and inorganic substances. — Wayfarer
Heidegger distinguishes between the being of things in the world and the being of dasein. We enjoy an additional dimension of being beyond that of a present at hand or ready to hand being. All existents are, by common definition or usage, beings. — Janus
I never knew what you though of Heidegger. He has useful things to say, I think that is not too controversial if you just read B&T with just a little sympathy. — Manuel
I think there has to be a distinction between the verbs 'to exist' and 'to be'. So 'existent' or 'phenomenon' doesn't have precisely the same meaning as 'being'. Furthermore, living beings embody the dynamic nature of being - the fact that it's a verb - more so than minerals and inorganic substances. — Wayfarer
What the shift to the mode of authenticity does is take this pragmatic engagement and make it thoroughly self-reflexive. We become concerned with Being as whole
rather than beings. But as Heidegger says, only on rare occasions do we think authentically. — Joshs
I don’t know that the being of things has any status for Heidegger except as a distorted and flattened modification of the ‘as’ structure’ of disclosure. Objective presence is deconstructed over and over in Being and Time. The being of things as presence implies extension, duration and self-identity. Heidegger shows such thinking to be in need of clarification. — Joshs
I've resisted reading Heidegger although quite a bit has filtered through in these debates and from various readings I've done — Wayfarer
Thanks although I think that differntiation obfuscates as much as clarifies. I prefer E F Schumacher's ontology in his Guide for the Perplexed - that there are levels of being. — Wayfarer
The concern with authenticity and being-towards-death are more aligned with the existentialist dimensions of Heidegger's thought, I'd say. — Janus
Dreyfus, if I remember right, sees Heidegger as a realist in the sense that he acknowledges the mind-independent existence of things. It is quite a while since I read Being and Time, Blattner, Dreyfus and others so it's hard for me to judge now without going back to the text (which I don't have time to do); do you see the Heidegger of B & T as an idealist? — Janus
Being-towards-death certainly reminds many of Kierkegaard, but the feature of Heidegger’s analysis of death that I find valuable doesn’t rest on death as the end of life but death as the end of every moment of time. That is, the finite nature of temporality , the fact that each néw moment of time is the death of a previous sense of meaning. So I link death directly to the nothing , angst and the uncanny. — Joshs
You’re right about Dreyfus’s interpretation, but Dreyfus has gone out of fashion as a reader of Husserl and Heidegger. I suppose I’d could call Heidegger an idealist in the sense that I don’t believe that things have an indeed et existence for him. But neither do contents of the world conform to faculties of mind ala Kant. Instead , world and self mutually form each other , which makes for an odd kind of idealism. — Joshs
There isn’t such a distinction for Heidegger. To exist is movement and becoming, not static presence to self. — Joshs
Are they? I had thought that primarily humans, and some of the other higher animals, are referred to as 'beings', and that tables are 'artifacts', rivers, 'natural phenomena'. Surely there's a distinction to be made there, isn't there? — Wayfarer
That a colour is not a "thing" does not mean a colour is nothing. — Manuel
Again, do people say "I saw a red" or "I'm seeing a yellow"? No, because they colours aren't recognized as things. — Manuel
The pretence is that somehow being - treated apparently as a thing - is structured by time.
Explain that. — Banno
I wouldn't say that to exist means becoming and not stasis. In that case we're in the being/becoming distinction again, only taking the side of the latter. But Heidegger rejects that as a false choice, as you know. Not sure what you're saying here. — Xtrix
Heidegger is not offering an interpretation himself, for example that being = time. — Xtrix
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