Thursday, October 23, 2008
Dr. Whitmire's comments about our class
Thank you so much for inviting me to join such a great group of students. I would love to reach the point of having 15 students registering for a class on phenomenology at WCU – much less a group that is prepared to discuss the really important issues in the texts! Your students are clearly very bright, and beyond that, I also understand now what Cal meant in his comments to you about them asking genuinely meaningful questions. It was a real pleasure to be able to sit down with them....
Monday, October 20, 2008
More comments from Prof. Schrag
Here is what Prof. Schrag wrote to me about our seminar and meeting with some of you afterward:
"I much enjoyed chatting with you on issues that matter and was happy for the opportunity to engage some of your students. They impressed me as quite gifted for college undergraduates. My brief encounters with them reminded me of Tillich's assessment of his encounter with the Purdue students when he came for the Franklin Matchette Lecture. He told me: 'My colleagues at Harvard asks questions that are technically correct. Your students ask questions that are meaningful'. And so also with your students! Be well, continue to do good work."
And so I implore you to take Prof. Schrag's advice and continue the good work with Dr. Whitmire this week as we discuss Merleau-Ponty and Caputo.
"I much enjoyed chatting with you on issues that matter and was happy for the opportunity to engage some of your students. They impressed me as quite gifted for college undergraduates. My brief encounters with them reminded me of Tillich's assessment of his encounter with the Purdue students when he came for the Franklin Matchette Lecture. He told me: 'My colleagues at Harvard asks questions that are technically correct. Your students ask questions that are meaningful'. And so also with your students! Be well, continue to do good work."
And so I implore you to take Prof. Schrag's advice and continue the good work with Dr. Whitmire this week as we discuss Merleau-Ponty and Caputo.
graded philosophical reports & term paper projects
I will return your graded philosophical reports in class this Wednesday evening. I want to encourage you to speak with me about your term paper projects this week if possible, since I have surgery this Friday and will be unavailable for meeting early next week.
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
Dr. Whitmire joins us 10/22
Prof. John Whitmire will be joining us in our next class on October 22nd for our discussion of Merleau-Ponty's essay "The Primacy of Perception" and John Caputo's essay "Jewgreek Bodies." Dr. Whitmire is a talented and accomplished scholar of contemporary philosophy, and it will be a wonderul pleasure and a distinct honor to have him participate in our seminar. Let's be ready for this discussion. I will open with few remarks about the Preface to Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception.
Thanks from Prof. Schrag
Dear Class:
Dr. Schrag told me that he very much appreciated being able to meet with us last week. I know that he was impressed at the level of our discussion and the quality of work of everyone who participated. [The conversation continued later informally at the Brew & View, of course.] Congratulations!
Dr. Schrag told me that he very much appreciated being able to meet with us last week. I know that he was impressed at the level of our discussion and the quality of work of everyone who participated. [The conversation continued later informally at the Brew & View, of course.] Congratulations!
Thursday, October 2, 2008
about the philosophical reports
There is a web address on the right top corner of this blog page that you should use to go to the philosophical reports. Please take a look at all of your hard work!
Being and Time, Division I, chapter III
Jacob Kountz
Précis of Being and Time, Division I, chapter III
In this chapter Heidegger attempts to discover the worldhood of the world. For phenomenology, this does not mean the scientific study of nature. Instead, Heidegger characterizes being-in-the-world as constitutive of part of Dasein’s being—“If no Dasein exists, there is no world,” and, “World is a characteristic of Dasein itself.” To clarify the world will mean to describe Dasein’s immediate experience of it (cf. Husserl’s Lebenswelt). The question, then, is how we exist in the world, not what the world is (Schrag 27).
¶ 14. The Idea of the Worldhood of the World in General
- If we are to reach the worldhood of the world, we must first recognize the path our investigation should take. Investigating nature, the way that mathematical sciences do, or taking inventory of objects in the world, will never reveal the world as such, because nature and objects presuppose the world.
- Because Dasein’s type of being is Existenz, Dasein is primordially standing out toward the world (Schrag). Being-in-the-world, then, is a fundamental part or existentiale of Dasein’s being.
- Heidegger distinguishes four ways the word ‘world’ is used:
1. As an ontical concept that signifies the totality of entities
2. As an ontological concept that signifies the Being of intraworldly entities
3. In another ontical sense, as the ‘wherein’ a factical Dasein lives
4. As an ontologico-existential concept of shared worldhood. This is the path Heidegger is after, and in this sense, only Dasein can be said to be worldly.
- If one fails to see Being-in-the-world as a state of Dasein, the phenomenon of worldhood likewise gets passed over. Philosophy has traditionally passed over worldhood because it has failed to see Dasein as in the world.
- “The world of everyday Dasein which is closest to it, is the environment.”
- “We shall seek the worldhood of the environment by going through an ontological Interpretation of those entities within-the-environment which we encounter as closest to us.”
¶ 15. The Being of the Entities Encountered in the Environment
- The kind of dealing which is closest to us is not any sort of discursive or theoretical thinking, but rather that kind of concern which manipulates things and puts them to use; and this has its own kind of existentiel ‘knowledge’ that Heidegger designates as concern. Concern designates our dealings with intraworldly beings, and is the foundation of theoretical knowledge.
- Equipment: essentially serves in-order-to. “…Dasein finds itself always amidst an already existing world of equipment, consisting of significant things each of which is experiences as something. The readiness-to-hand of a piece of equipment consists in its having a certain significance” (Brandom, 217). Equipment is always in reference to a totality of equipment, and necessarily includes a reference and assignment to materials and to the person who will use it, although this is not thematically grasped. In our concernful dealing with the world we encounter not mere things or things with values, but equipment. The kind of ‘sight’ which sees this is called circumspection.
- “The kind of Being which equipment possesses—in which it manifests itself in its own right—we call ‘readiness-to-hand’ [Zuhandenheit].” Readiness-to-hand must, in a way, withdraw in order to be authentically ready-to-hand: only when we are focusing on the work, using the tool and not thinking about it is it primordially ready-to-hand.
- The work to be produced, as the “towards-which” has the kind of Being that belongs to equipment.
- “The system of ongoing purposes and projects he refers to as hierarchical ‘towards-which,’ ‘in-order-to,’ and ‘for-the-sake-of’ relations between our activities and our short- and long-term goals” (Hall 127).
¶ 16. How the Worldly Character of the Environment Announces itself in Entities Within-the-world
- Dasein is ontically constituted by Being-in-the-World and an understanding of its own being, no matter how indistinct, belongs to Dasein, and thus Dasein has a pre-ontological understanding of the world. Investigating the intraworldly character of things will help us investigate the worldhood of the world.
- The intraworldly character of things becomes apparent when the equipmental order is disturbed, “when things go wrong in the right sort of way” (Hall 127).
1. when equipment is unusable it is called conspicuous
2. when missing it is called obtrusive
3. when what we don’t need is in the way, unneeded it is called obstinate
In these cases a being that should be ready-to-hand appears as ‘merely there’, stuff, or as Heidegger calls it, present-at-hand.
- The structure of the being of what is ready-to-hand as equipment is determined by references or assignments. When an assignment has been disturbed, then it becomes explicit. The totality of the ‘towards-this’ is uncovered and lights up worldhood.
- When something goes wrong with our dealings with equipment, the world of practical activity shows up. The world is this network of relations which contains equipmental totalities with their internal relations—that is, references—and their external relations—assignments—to the ones who use them.
- Being-in-the-world amounts to a non-thematic circumspective absorption in references or assignments constitutive for the readiness-to-hand of a totality of equipment. Thus Heidegger wants to look at references and signs more closely.
¶ 17. References and Signs
- As discovered above, a piece of equipment has meaning only within a totality of references, and it has become clear also, but only in a preliminary way, that there must be a relation between this referential totality and the worldhood of the world.
- “A sign is not a Thing which stands to another Thing in the relationship of indicating; it is rather an item of equipment which explicitly raises a totality of equipment into our circumspection so that together with it the worldly character of the ready-to-hand announces itself.”
- Referring is, formally, a relating. But relation is not a genus for kinds or references which may somehow become differentiated as sign, symbol, expression, or signification. Referring as indicating is grounded in the Being-structure of equipment, in serviceability for….
- Dasein is always somehow directed by signs or references and on its way; standing and waiting are only limiting cases of this directional ‘on-its-way’.
- “The sign is not only ready-to-hand with other equipment, but in its readiness-to-hand the environment becomes in each case explicitly accessible for circumspection. A sign is something ontically ready-to-hand, which functions both as this definite equipment and as something indicative of the ontological structure of readiness-to-hand, or referential totalities, and of worldhood.” Signs signal the world.
¶ 18. Involvement and Significance; the Worldhood of the World
- The character of Being which belongs to the ready-to-hand is an involvement (Bewandtnis which Kockelmans translates as ‘being destined’ or ‘destination’). If something has an involvement or destination, this implies letting it be involved with or destined for something. This relationship is called assignment or reference. This involvement or destination is ontological, not ontical.
- The being proper to the ready-to-hand is characterized by a referential structure, it has in itself the character of ‘being relative to….’ For instance, the hammer is essentially relative to, involved in, or destined for hammering. This ‘being relative’ defines the essence of something ready-to-hand.
- The involvement or destination reveals the proper being of something ready-to-hand. Dasein is the ultimate ‘what…for’ in which all references included in destination find their final term. In other words, every equipmental totality is ultimately for Dasein.
- This a priori letting-something-be-involved is the condition for the possibility of encountering anything ready-to-hand. In other words, to discover the readiness-to-hand of a being, Dasein must first discover its destination by ‘letting it be’, for instance, a hammer, which means letting it hammer. Science doesn’t ‘let things be,’ but phenomenology does.
- “The ‘wherein’ of an act of understanding which assigns or refers itself, is that for which one lets entities be encountered in the kind of Being that belongs to involvements; and this ‘wherein’ is the phenomenon of the world. And the structure of that to which Dasein assigns itself is what makes up the worldhood of the world” (119). We can say, then, that worldhood is that referential totality which constitutes significance.
- The significance thus disclosed is an existential state of Dasein—of its being-in-the-world; and as such, it is the ontical condition for the possibility that a totality of involvements can be discovered at all.
- Hall argues that we should not understand worldhood as merely a sort of practical comportment towards the world, but rather as something more primordial, “which precludes any use of the subject-object model…” (124). This is a fundamental split from Husserl’s emphasis on cognitive acts of consciousness.
- Three types of being in the chapter:
1. ready-to-hand, a category: equipment, assigned or referred to something, involved
2. presence-at-hand, a category: ‘objective, person-independent, causally interacting subjects of scientific inquiry’ (Brandom).
3. the being of that ontical condition which makes it possible for entities within-the-world to be discovered at all—the worldhood of the world: an existentiale
- In relation to the previous section: The being of equipment is involvement. And it is such involvement that comprises a system of references or assignments. An entity is discovered when it is assigned or referred to something.
¶ 19. The Definition of the ‘World’ as res extensa ¶ 20. Foundations of the Ontological Definition of the ‘World’ ¶ 21. Hermeneutical Discussion of the Cartesian Ontology of the ‘World’
- As Heidegger argued in his introduction, one of phenomenology’s chief methods is the destruction of the history of ontology. Another is the use of hermeneutics in order to understand. This is precisely what he is doing in this section.
- Descartes’ conception of the world has a number of problems:
1. Descartes understands the world as corporeal, extended substance.
2. Descartes only understands things as entities
3. The meaning of being is held to be universal and self-evident, and thus, as the Heidegger’s introduction maintains, Descartes misinterprets being.
4. Descartes reaches neither an ontological explication of the world nor does he characterize entities in such a way that they can lead toward the phenomenon of the world. Instead Descartes fails to destroy the history of his problem and only interprets Nature.
5. Descartes sees Dasein as ultimately the same type of being as res extensa—namely, as substance
- Descartes’ influence on modern philosophy is unfortunately enormous, according to Heidegger. Consequently, modern philosophy tends to falsify our immediate interactions with the world and hypostatizes Dasein and the world into substances (Schrag 28).
¶ 22. The Spatiality of the Ready-to-hand Within-the-world
- What is ready-to-hand in our everyday dealings has the character of closeness. According to the use we make of it, equipment is more or less close to us. “The worldliness of Dasein puts it in a position to encounter things; their physical nearness does not” (Vycinas 32).
- Equipment has a place it belongs, its region. The region is the a priori condition for the assignment of places. “The readiness-to-hand which belongs to any such region beforehand has the character of inconspicuous familiarity, and it has it in an even more primordial sense than does the Being of the ready-to-hand. The region itself becomes visible in a conspicuous manner only when one discovers the ready-to-hand circumspectively and does so in the deficient modes of concern.” As with equipment, often we don’t notice the region until something is disturbed or missing.
- “To encounter the ready-to-hand in its environmental space remains ontically possible only because Dasein itself is ‘spatial’ with regard to its Being-in-the-world.”
¶ 23. The Spatiality of Being-in-the-world
- Dasein is not a being-present-at-hand in the way a hammer is. Yet Dasein is a priori in the world spatially. Dasein’s spatiality shows the characters of de-severance and directionality.
- De-severance (or de-distancing): a constitutive state or existentiale of Dasein’s Being; it circumspectively makes farness vanish, brings close. “The circumspective de-severing of Dasein’s everydayness reveals the Being-in-itself of the ‘true world’—of that entity which Dasein, as something existing, is already alongside.”
- Something can be very close to us and yet be environmentally more remote.
- “As Being-in-the-world, Dasein maintains itself essentially in a desevering.” “Dasein is essentially de-severance—that is, it is spatial.”
- Dasein is also directional. Every de-severing is directional, that is, it gives a place to things.
¶ 24. Space and Dasein’s Spatiality
- Encountering entities within the world means giving them space, making room for them, freeing the ready-to-hand for its spatiality. Making room is an existentiale and belongs to being-in-the-world
- Space is not in the subject, nor is the world in space. Kockelmans expresses this by saying that Dasein, itself neither subjective nor objective, spatializes. This is a major break with Kant: “Space is nothing else than the form of all phenomena of the external sense, that is, the subjective condition of the sensibility under which alone external intuition is possible.”
- Space itself does not have the kind of being of something present-at-hand or the kind of being that Dasein has. Note that Heidegger is okay with this. There can be a multitude of ways of being.
What is the Ultimate Significance of Worldhood?
Heidegger reveals the world as the most basic and common structure of involvements that are intimately related to human being. We do not normally focus on our amazing familiarity and skillful dealing with the world. What is beautiful about Heidegger’s account is that things appear to us as what they are only against this worldly background of familiarity, skillfulness, and concern. Pieces of equipment are in their very being the roles they serve their users, and those users (Dasein) are in their very being (although not exhaustively) the practical roles into which they cast themselves. Disturbances in this practical activity allow us to take hold of the substratum of our dealings with the world. “All human activity is worldly; that is, it requires a background of implicit familiarity, competence, and concern or involvement” (Hall).
Questions:
1. Heidegger makes it clear that he is aiming at a priori structures of Dasein. However, unlike Kant, he doesn’t want to base these a priori conditions as structures of the mind. ‘Where’ are they, then? In our pre-ontological understanding of the world (as Schrag implies, 33)? Coinciding with the type of being we are, i.e., existential? Or what?
2. What status does the body receive in Heidegger’s analytic of Dasein? He seems to have an ambivalent stance toward it. Dasein is embodied for Heidegger, yet he never mentions that body.
3. “ [Phenomenology] tries to give a direct description of our experience as it is, without taking account of its psychological origin and the causal explanations which the scientist, the historian or the sociologist maybe able to provide…yet the whole of Sein und Zeit springs from an indication given by Husserl and amounts to no more than an explicit account the ‘natürlicher Weltbegriff’ or the ‘Lebenswelt’…. (Merleau-Ponty vii). I think Heidegger would hate this because he believes he is doing something deeper by revealing the being of beings, and that this is a ‘deeper’ level. Do you think Heidegger accomplishes this task; is he going any deeper?
References:
Brandom, Robert. “Heidegger’s Categories in Being and Time.” From A Companion to Heidegger. Ed. Dreyfus & Wrathall. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005.
Hall, Harrison. “Intentionality and world: Division I of Being and Time.” From The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger. Ed. Charles Guignon. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Kockelmans, Joseph. Martin Heidegger: A First Introduction to His Philosophy. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1965.
Schrag, Calvin. Existence and Freedom: Towards an Ontology of Human Finitude. Northwestern University Press, 1983.
Vycinas, Vincent. Earth and Gods: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Martin Heidegger. The Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969.
Précis of Being and Time, Division I, chapter III
In this chapter Heidegger attempts to discover the worldhood of the world. For phenomenology, this does not mean the scientific study of nature. Instead, Heidegger characterizes being-in-the-world as constitutive of part of Dasein’s being—“If no Dasein exists, there is no world,” and, “World is a characteristic of Dasein itself.” To clarify the world will mean to describe Dasein’s immediate experience of it (cf. Husserl’s Lebenswelt). The question, then, is how we exist in the world, not what the world is (Schrag 27).
¶ 14. The Idea of the Worldhood of the World in General
- If we are to reach the worldhood of the world, we must first recognize the path our investigation should take. Investigating nature, the way that mathematical sciences do, or taking inventory of objects in the world, will never reveal the world as such, because nature and objects presuppose the world.
- Because Dasein’s type of being is Existenz, Dasein is primordially standing out toward the world (Schrag). Being-in-the-world, then, is a fundamental part or existentiale of Dasein’s being.
- Heidegger distinguishes four ways the word ‘world’ is used:
1. As an ontical concept that signifies the totality of entities
2. As an ontological concept that signifies the Being of intraworldly entities
3. In another ontical sense, as the ‘wherein’ a factical Dasein lives
4. As an ontologico-existential concept of shared worldhood. This is the path Heidegger is after, and in this sense, only Dasein can be said to be worldly.
- If one fails to see Being-in-the-world as a state of Dasein, the phenomenon of worldhood likewise gets passed over. Philosophy has traditionally passed over worldhood because it has failed to see Dasein as in the world.
- “The world of everyday Dasein which is closest to it, is the environment.”
- “We shall seek the worldhood of the environment by going through an ontological Interpretation of those entities within-the-environment which we encounter as closest to us.”
¶ 15. The Being of the Entities Encountered in the Environment
- The kind of dealing which is closest to us is not any sort of discursive or theoretical thinking, but rather that kind of concern which manipulates things and puts them to use; and this has its own kind of existentiel ‘knowledge’ that Heidegger designates as concern. Concern designates our dealings with intraworldly beings, and is the foundation of theoretical knowledge.
- Equipment: essentially serves in-order-to. “…Dasein finds itself always amidst an already existing world of equipment, consisting of significant things each of which is experiences as something. The readiness-to-hand of a piece of equipment consists in its having a certain significance” (Brandom, 217). Equipment is always in reference to a totality of equipment, and necessarily includes a reference and assignment to materials and to the person who will use it, although this is not thematically grasped. In our concernful dealing with the world we encounter not mere things or things with values, but equipment. The kind of ‘sight’ which sees this is called circumspection.
- “The kind of Being which equipment possesses—in which it manifests itself in its own right—we call ‘readiness-to-hand’ [Zuhandenheit].” Readiness-to-hand must, in a way, withdraw in order to be authentically ready-to-hand: only when we are focusing on the work, using the tool and not thinking about it is it primordially ready-to-hand.
- The work to be produced, as the “towards-which” has the kind of Being that belongs to equipment.
- “The system of ongoing purposes and projects he refers to as hierarchical ‘towards-which,’ ‘in-order-to,’ and ‘for-the-sake-of’ relations between our activities and our short- and long-term goals” (Hall 127).
¶ 16. How the Worldly Character of the Environment Announces itself in Entities Within-the-world
- Dasein is ontically constituted by Being-in-the-World and an understanding of its own being, no matter how indistinct, belongs to Dasein, and thus Dasein has a pre-ontological understanding of the world. Investigating the intraworldly character of things will help us investigate the worldhood of the world.
- The intraworldly character of things becomes apparent when the equipmental order is disturbed, “when things go wrong in the right sort of way” (Hall 127).
1. when equipment is unusable it is called conspicuous
2. when missing it is called obtrusive
3. when what we don’t need is in the way, unneeded it is called obstinate
In these cases a being that should be ready-to-hand appears as ‘merely there’, stuff, or as Heidegger calls it, present-at-hand.
- The structure of the being of what is ready-to-hand as equipment is determined by references or assignments. When an assignment has been disturbed, then it becomes explicit. The totality of the ‘towards-this’ is uncovered and lights up worldhood.
- When something goes wrong with our dealings with equipment, the world of practical activity shows up. The world is this network of relations which contains equipmental totalities with their internal relations—that is, references—and their external relations—assignments—to the ones who use them.
- Being-in-the-world amounts to a non-thematic circumspective absorption in references or assignments constitutive for the readiness-to-hand of a totality of equipment. Thus Heidegger wants to look at references and signs more closely.
¶ 17. References and Signs
- As discovered above, a piece of equipment has meaning only within a totality of references, and it has become clear also, but only in a preliminary way, that there must be a relation between this referential totality and the worldhood of the world.
- “A sign is not a Thing which stands to another Thing in the relationship of indicating; it is rather an item of equipment which explicitly raises a totality of equipment into our circumspection so that together with it the worldly character of the ready-to-hand announces itself.”
- Referring is, formally, a relating. But relation is not a genus for kinds or references which may somehow become differentiated as sign, symbol, expression, or signification. Referring as indicating is grounded in the Being-structure of equipment, in serviceability for….
- Dasein is always somehow directed by signs or references and on its way; standing and waiting are only limiting cases of this directional ‘on-its-way’.
- “The sign is not only ready-to-hand with other equipment, but in its readiness-to-hand the environment becomes in each case explicitly accessible for circumspection. A sign is something ontically ready-to-hand, which functions both as this definite equipment and as something indicative of the ontological structure of readiness-to-hand, or referential totalities, and of worldhood.” Signs signal the world.
¶ 18. Involvement and Significance; the Worldhood of the World
- The character of Being which belongs to the ready-to-hand is an involvement (Bewandtnis which Kockelmans translates as ‘being destined’ or ‘destination’). If something has an involvement or destination, this implies letting it be involved with or destined for something. This relationship is called assignment or reference. This involvement or destination is ontological, not ontical.
- The being proper to the ready-to-hand is characterized by a referential structure, it has in itself the character of ‘being relative to….’ For instance, the hammer is essentially relative to, involved in, or destined for hammering. This ‘being relative’ defines the essence of something ready-to-hand.
- The involvement or destination reveals the proper being of something ready-to-hand. Dasein is the ultimate ‘what…for’ in which all references included in destination find their final term. In other words, every equipmental totality is ultimately for Dasein.
- This a priori letting-something-be-involved is the condition for the possibility of encountering anything ready-to-hand. In other words, to discover the readiness-to-hand of a being, Dasein must first discover its destination by ‘letting it be’, for instance, a hammer, which means letting it hammer. Science doesn’t ‘let things be,’ but phenomenology does.
- “The ‘wherein’ of an act of understanding which assigns or refers itself, is that for which one lets entities be encountered in the kind of Being that belongs to involvements; and this ‘wherein’ is the phenomenon of the world. And the structure of that to which Dasein assigns itself is what makes up the worldhood of the world” (119). We can say, then, that worldhood is that referential totality which constitutes significance.
- The significance thus disclosed is an existential state of Dasein—of its being-in-the-world; and as such, it is the ontical condition for the possibility that a totality of involvements can be discovered at all.
- Hall argues that we should not understand worldhood as merely a sort of practical comportment towards the world, but rather as something more primordial, “which precludes any use of the subject-object model…” (124). This is a fundamental split from Husserl’s emphasis on cognitive acts of consciousness.
- Three types of being in the chapter:
1. ready-to-hand, a category: equipment, assigned or referred to something, involved
2. presence-at-hand, a category: ‘objective, person-independent, causally interacting subjects of scientific inquiry’ (Brandom).
3. the being of that ontical condition which makes it possible for entities within-the-world to be discovered at all—the worldhood of the world: an existentiale
- In relation to the previous section: The being of equipment is involvement. And it is such involvement that comprises a system of references or assignments. An entity is discovered when it is assigned or referred to something.
¶ 19. The Definition of the ‘World’ as res extensa ¶ 20. Foundations of the Ontological Definition of the ‘World’ ¶ 21. Hermeneutical Discussion of the Cartesian Ontology of the ‘World’
- As Heidegger argued in his introduction, one of phenomenology’s chief methods is the destruction of the history of ontology. Another is the use of hermeneutics in order to understand. This is precisely what he is doing in this section.
- Descartes’ conception of the world has a number of problems:
1. Descartes understands the world as corporeal, extended substance.
2. Descartes only understands things as entities
3. The meaning of being is held to be universal and self-evident, and thus, as the Heidegger’s introduction maintains, Descartes misinterprets being.
4. Descartes reaches neither an ontological explication of the world nor does he characterize entities in such a way that they can lead toward the phenomenon of the world. Instead Descartes fails to destroy the history of his problem and only interprets Nature.
5. Descartes sees Dasein as ultimately the same type of being as res extensa—namely, as substance
- Descartes’ influence on modern philosophy is unfortunately enormous, according to Heidegger. Consequently, modern philosophy tends to falsify our immediate interactions with the world and hypostatizes Dasein and the world into substances (Schrag 28).
¶ 22. The Spatiality of the Ready-to-hand Within-the-world
- What is ready-to-hand in our everyday dealings has the character of closeness. According to the use we make of it, equipment is more or less close to us. “The worldliness of Dasein puts it in a position to encounter things; their physical nearness does not” (Vycinas 32).
- Equipment has a place it belongs, its region. The region is the a priori condition for the assignment of places. “The readiness-to-hand which belongs to any such region beforehand has the character of inconspicuous familiarity, and it has it in an even more primordial sense than does the Being of the ready-to-hand. The region itself becomes visible in a conspicuous manner only when one discovers the ready-to-hand circumspectively and does so in the deficient modes of concern.” As with equipment, often we don’t notice the region until something is disturbed or missing.
- “To encounter the ready-to-hand in its environmental space remains ontically possible only because Dasein itself is ‘spatial’ with regard to its Being-in-the-world.”
¶ 23. The Spatiality of Being-in-the-world
- Dasein is not a being-present-at-hand in the way a hammer is. Yet Dasein is a priori in the world spatially. Dasein’s spatiality shows the characters of de-severance and directionality.
- De-severance (or de-distancing): a constitutive state or existentiale of Dasein’s Being; it circumspectively makes farness vanish, brings close. “The circumspective de-severing of Dasein’s everydayness reveals the Being-in-itself of the ‘true world’—of that entity which Dasein, as something existing, is already alongside.”
- Something can be very close to us and yet be environmentally more remote.
- “As Being-in-the-world, Dasein maintains itself essentially in a desevering.” “Dasein is essentially de-severance—that is, it is spatial.”
- Dasein is also directional. Every de-severing is directional, that is, it gives a place to things.
¶ 24. Space and Dasein’s Spatiality
- Encountering entities within the world means giving them space, making room for them, freeing the ready-to-hand for its spatiality. Making room is an existentiale and belongs to being-in-the-world
- Space is not in the subject, nor is the world in space. Kockelmans expresses this by saying that Dasein, itself neither subjective nor objective, spatializes. This is a major break with Kant: “Space is nothing else than the form of all phenomena of the external sense, that is, the subjective condition of the sensibility under which alone external intuition is possible.”
- Space itself does not have the kind of being of something present-at-hand or the kind of being that Dasein has. Note that Heidegger is okay with this. There can be a multitude of ways of being.
What is the Ultimate Significance of Worldhood?
Heidegger reveals the world as the most basic and common structure of involvements that are intimately related to human being. We do not normally focus on our amazing familiarity and skillful dealing with the world. What is beautiful about Heidegger’s account is that things appear to us as what they are only against this worldly background of familiarity, skillfulness, and concern. Pieces of equipment are in their very being the roles they serve their users, and those users (Dasein) are in their very being (although not exhaustively) the practical roles into which they cast themselves. Disturbances in this practical activity allow us to take hold of the substratum of our dealings with the world. “All human activity is worldly; that is, it requires a background of implicit familiarity, competence, and concern or involvement” (Hall).
Questions:
1. Heidegger makes it clear that he is aiming at a priori structures of Dasein. However, unlike Kant, he doesn’t want to base these a priori conditions as structures of the mind. ‘Where’ are they, then? In our pre-ontological understanding of the world (as Schrag implies, 33)? Coinciding with the type of being we are, i.e., existential? Or what?
2. What status does the body receive in Heidegger’s analytic of Dasein? He seems to have an ambivalent stance toward it. Dasein is embodied for Heidegger, yet he never mentions that body.
3. “ [Phenomenology] tries to give a direct description of our experience as it is, without taking account of its psychological origin and the causal explanations which the scientist, the historian or the sociologist maybe able to provide…yet the whole of Sein und Zeit springs from an indication given by Husserl and amounts to no more than an explicit account the ‘natürlicher Weltbegriff’ or the ‘Lebenswelt’…. (Merleau-Ponty vii). I think Heidegger would hate this because he believes he is doing something deeper by revealing the being of beings, and that this is a ‘deeper’ level. Do you think Heidegger accomplishes this task; is he going any deeper?
References:
Brandom, Robert. “Heidegger’s Categories in Being and Time.” From A Companion to Heidegger. Ed. Dreyfus & Wrathall. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005.
Hall, Harrison. “Intentionality and world: Division I of Being and Time.” From The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger. Ed. Charles Guignon. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Kockelmans, Joseph. Martin Heidegger: A First Introduction to His Philosophy. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1965.
Schrag, Calvin. Existence and Freedom: Towards an Ontology of Human Finitude. Northwestern University Press, 1983.
Vycinas, Vincent. Earth and Gods: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Martin Heidegger. The Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)