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Fooloso4, Heidegger is very new to me as you may have gathered. I hope that you can help me with a further question. You wrote at the start of your last paragraph:
Being is not something that gives, it is not a being. He wants to draw our attention to the giving rather than to get locked into the assumption that there must be something, some being, that gives. He calls this assumption, metaphysics. The rejection of metaphysics is made possible by its own history. It has played itself out.
Is "Being" in your context synonymous with Dasein? I understand that we are passive regarding ethics which when ethics become morality it's a group activity so that being gives passively to the future. However how can this passivity square with the variety of perceptions that seem to me to attach to individual beings and which are what create individual subjects of experience?
Is Dasein one or many? Is Dasein simply nothing other than the past giving way to the future ?
Fooloso4 wrote regarding the thought of Heidegger:
Despite our differences we all think like 21st century westerners. We might individually or as part of a larger group say “yes” or “no” but our options are already determined by our historical situatedness.
How could he say we all think like for example 21st century westerners considering that he was aware of political tensions, and must surely have been aware of cultural relativity of beliefs? Even within the small and predominantly western confines of these Philosophy forums there are different ideas and beliefs which are historically generated.
I see that there is considerably more than "one further question"
Belinda: did you ever ask yourself when an idea rises in your mind, from whence the idea came? Note that the act of putting ideas in play in some context and to some purpose of point needs accounting. You were born INTO English (or not; no matter, at some point the language became yours) and into an unspeakably complex world of dasein. Think of the time when you were a child, how you without question received the speech, the idioms, the complex of facial expressions, body nuances: you internalized all this. Choice and originality have meaning, surely, but only WITHIN this body of conformity. One must conform before one creates. H's authenticity presupposes conformity. Sartre thought the subjective end of an intentional relationship was a kind of nothingness, hence his claim to a rigorous accountability. But no theory of freedom includes a premise of something ex nihilo. The nothingness of judgment is senseless without the somethingness to work with. These are institutions of language and culture. I think John Haugeland's Heidegger on Being a Person is available online. He actually depersonalizes dasein altogether, and makes an 'I' into a 'we', or better, making the 'I' into a body of assumptions that constitute shared dasein. i say General Motors in some meaning context and instantly you know what i mean and draw upon other shared knowledge to respond. H. says that all of it, every thought in your mind, even as you read these words, is history, or historicity, putting aside any notion of the world as presence at hand intimating its nature intuitively.
Foucault drew on this: the self is being ventriloquized by history. Do YOU speak? Or is it just language? I borrow this from an intro to Foucault i read: "Foucault associates himself
with the modernist voice of Beckett’s Molloy: ‘I must go on; I can’t go on; I must go on; I must say words as long as there are words, I must say them until they find me, until they say me . . .’ (Samuel
Beckett, The Unnameable, quoted in DL, 215).
It is, i think, the very height of existential awareness to become aware of one self as language. The question then is: This distance that establishes itself between the living inquirer and the world, that rises out of an understanding that every movement of knowledge, belief, every act of spontaneity is actually born out of bad faith (a Sartrian term that for my purpose simply designates the identification of the self with something fixed and without choice, like a tree): does this distance constitute a relationship with the things that transcends dasein? In other words, when one becomes aware that *one* is not really speaking as the words pour forth, isn't this a breaking point? for me, it is, and I say this because i view philosophy as inherently destructive. Our task is liberation. Language is, as H tells us, instrumental, ready to hand, use based. But for what end? Caring. i think Kierkegaard was absolutely right: It is in our passions that we find who we truly are.
One must conform before one creates. H's authenticity presupposes conformity.
I do understand this and I understand it as how we learn, i.e. give to the future, by way of thesis, antithesis(or analysis), synthesis, with no end in view. Conformity would be thesis according to that model.
I feel that I understand most of your post. Thank you very much for your beautiful explanation.
I still cannot understand how Dasein is not individual Daseins. Sure, I recognise that I am within a community of language and its shared values and beliefs. However within the language-culture community there are individuals who, especially in western individualistic communities, are engaging with other individuals in conforming, objecting, and synthesising.
I also feel that I understand the matter of your last paragraph about how what a person does is what a person is: existence before essence. And that includes me and all my philosophising, faiths, prejudices, hopes, passions, and emotional and practical reactions.At the moment of my death 'God' the Omniscient Biographer could interpret me but not until then.
Human nature too is not a fait accompli, and if it ever were a fait accompli that would coincide with the end of history and with the advent of a transcendent Historiographer.
"When one becomes aware that one is not really speaking as the words pour forth". Yes, but HereandNow's words are unique to the unique environment against which the utterance is a movement into the future. You will never again write this post of yours in the exact same circumstances in which you have just done so. Is this post of yours and the minute details of its historical circumstances not a unique Dasein?
Dasein is a term for our unique relationship with Being. Dasein is the being to which Being is disclosed. Dasein, however, is not synonomous with human being. He refers specifically to Western history. He claims that philosophy originates with the Greeks and is unique to Western history, that it was the Greeks who asked the question of Being. Although he reserved the term philosophy for the history of Western practice, there was a good deal of interest and correspondence with Japan.
As to individual differences, you might think of it as items on a menu. Even though we may select different items the alternatives are determined by what is on the menu. The menu itself is not fixed but changes over time. As with all analogies this one won't hold up if pushed too far.
"Thus to work out the question of being means to make a being - one who questions - transparent in its being. Asking this question, as a mode of being of a being, is itself essentially determined by what is asked about in it - being.* This being which we ourselves in each case are and which includes inquiry among possibilities of its being we formulate terminologically as Da-sein. The explicit and lucid formulation of the question of the meaning of being requires a prior suitable explication of a being (Da-sein) with regard to its being.^
* Da-sein: being held out into the nothingness of being, held as relation.
^ But the meaning of being is not drawn from this being."
(p.7 Being and Time)
"As ways in which human beings behave, sciences have this being's (the human being's) kind of being. We are defining this being terminologically as Da-sein."
(p.11 Being and Time)
"Da-sein is a being that does not simply occur among other beings. Rather it is ontically distinguished by the fact that in its being this being is concerned about its very being. Thus it is constitutive of the being of Da-sein to have, in its very being, a relation of being to this being. And this in turn means that Da-sein understands itself in its being in some way and with some explicitness. It is proper to this being that it be disclosed to itself with and through its being. Understanding of being is itself a determination of being of Da-sein.* The ontic distinction of Da-sein lies in the fact that it is ontological.
* But in this case being not only as the being of human being (Existenz). That becomes clear from the following. Being-in-the-world includes in itself the relation of existence to being in the whole: the understanding of being."
Thanks to all who have contributed to this thread. I regret that I'm a long way from understanding Heidegger although I'm not going to give up, and will pay a lot of attention to forthcoming posts.
Fooloso4 wrote:
Dasein is a term for our unique relationship with Being. Dasein is the being to which Being is disclosed. Dasein, however, is not synonomous with human being.
I understand this in the context within which 'Being' = existence itself. If Being is synonymous with existence itself, then is Dasein awareness of existence itself and beings plural self consciously relating themselves to existence itself?
If so it reminds me of the poet Wordsworth claiming that every flower enjoys the air it breathes. I am not actually enquiring if Heidegger was pantheist.
"Thus to work out the question of being means to make a being - one who questions - transparent in its being. Asking this question, as a mode of being of a being, is itself essentially determined by what is asked about in it - being.* This being which we ourselves in each case are and which includes inquiry among possibilities of its being we formulate terminologically as Da-sein. The explicit and lucid formulation of the question of the meaning of being requires a prior suitable explication of a being (Da-sein) with regard to its being.^
* Da-sein: being held out into the nothingness of being, held as relation.
^ But the meaning of being is not drawn from this being."
(p.7 Being and Time)
"As ways in which human beings behave, sciences have this being's (the human being's) kind of being. We are defining this being terminologically as Da-sein."
(p.11 Being and Time)
"Da-sein is a being that does not simply occur among other beings. Rather it is ontically distinguished by the fact that in its being this being is concerned about its very being. Thus it is constitutive of the being of Da-sein to have, in its very being, a relation of being to this being. And this in turn means that Da-sein understands itself in its being in some way and with some explicitness. It is proper to this being that it be disclosed to itself with and through its being. Understanding of being is itself a determination of being of Da-sein.* The ontic distinction of Da-sein lies in the fact that it is ontological.
* But in this case being not only as the being of human being (Existenz). That becomes clear from the following. Being-in-the-world includes in itself the relation of existence to being in the whole: the understanding of being."
[/quote]
I am not clear on where your comments are, and where your logic is in them. Where does H. leave off and you begin? And when you say dasein is held out into the nothingness of being, but the meaning is not drawn from this being, I am a bit confused: nothingness of being?
I was just showing how Heidegger presents Da-sein. If you cannot see the logic in them they are Heidegger's words not mine. I did not say anything ... they are Heidegger's words as presented in teh translation.
Heidegger gives his definition of Being in the beginning of the book: "Being is the transcendens pure and simple. And the transcendence of Dasein's Being is distinctive in that it implies the possibility and the necessity of the most radical individuation. Every disclosure of Being as the transcendens is transcendental knowledge. Phenomenological truth (the disclosedness of Being) is veritas transcendentalis."
"We do not see things as they are; we see things as we are." - Anaïs Nin
In the book I mentioned in my post #26 in this thread, it is suggested that Heidegger advises the practice of "meditative thinking" to discover one's true identity or personal genius and live an authentic life.
Also, it seems that it would be best to start by reading Heidegger's book, Introduction to Metaphysics, before diving into the more opaque Being and Time.
"We do not see things as they are; we see things as we are." - Anaïs Nin
Maybe. I have only read BT. Did you mean "personal genesis" not "genius"?
-- Updated August 8th, 2016, 1:36 am to add the following --
Hereandnow -
I guess you can see why I think Heidegger is wrapped up in language more than phenomenology. The Da-sein is presented in the words above seems to take some delight in confusing the reader or simply uses sophistic techniques to hide the circularity of the argument presented for the existence of Da-sein.
I have to admit that in places its makes sense to me, and from my first reading I did find use in the term in places but not in others.
Still looking for part where he talks about "seeing".
I am familiar with Jung and his idea of Individuation. Husserl himself did say that phenomenology shares many characteristics with psychology.
I don't think that Da-sein is related to any kind of Collective Unconscious and therefore not really something I can say relates to Jungian Individuation.
I have looked at this idea before, but the point of Jungian psychology and the unconscious makes the unconscious, obviously, not accessible to consciousness. Consciousness only presupposes unconscious contents causally and Jung goes further into the idea of Collective Unconscious being presented to us through symbolism and metaphor. There are some interesting similarities as both Jung and Heidegger focus a lot on interpretation in one way or another.
I see a reasonable amount of relation to another thread of RJG where he talks about the experience and the experiencer as being in some way separate. He says the experiencer is required for an experience yet this falls into infinite regression towards the idea of first experience and its founding. In this respect I see Da-sein as something similar yet it is trying to opperate outside of causal relation and thus becomes a little opaque in my mind. I have the same issue with Husserl's monad, which is comparable to Heidegger's Da-sein in my understanding, although I habe not quite got to the heart of what either means so I am making soem assumptions ahead of finishing my look at both terms more thoroughly.
Heidegger and Jung's use of the term "individuation" is similar in that they both define it to mean becoming a whole, authentic individual as opposed to an "inauthentic" member of the human herd.
Burning Ghost: the point of Jungian psychology and the unconscious makes the unconscious, obviously, not accessible to consciousness. Consciousness only presupposes unconscious contents causally and Jung goes further into the idea of Collective Unconscious being presented to us through symbolism and metaphor.
There is a contradiction in your two statements: if the unconscious is inaccessible to consciousness, how can it (the unconscious) communicate to the conscious mind via symbols and metaphors? Also Jung's "unconscious"
"We do not see things as they are; we see things as we are." - Anaïs Nin
