Date: Mon, 17 Jul 1995 19:55:01 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: Re: Division Two, Chapters I and II (WARNING: very long message). (fwd)




On Mon, 17 Jul 1995, David Schenk wrote:

> As a very quick response to one of Lois Shawver's worries, I don't
> consider Heidegger a poet or a poetic philosopher; I consider him a
> philosopher, plain and simple.  I do think _BT_ is trying to get at the
> way Dasein *really* is, and I also think that amounts to a kind of
> metpahysics of Dasein.  Maybe it's just that in my training "metaphysics" 
> and "ontology" are quite nearly synonymous, and neither of them is in any
> way a 'dirty word'.  I understand that in his later books and papers
> Heidegger eschewed 'metaphysical thinking' and even 'philosophy' (I never
> did understand what he meant by all that), but in his early work he _was_
> a metaphysician, and a very good one at that.  After all, this is the man
> who wrote the classic "What Is Metaphysics?" 

Because I want to read Heidegger in the way that makes most sense to me, 
and I believe that language cannot capture or represent reality.  It 
'discloses' it, in the sense that when I describe something, that 
beautiful old antique table with the carving, for example, I disclose it 
differently than when I describe it as that broken down old table.  My 
language shows an aspect, brings to light a certain reading of the 
world.  That's how I understand Heidegger to have chosen to abandon the 
mirror metaphor of description and theory and to have elected, instead, 
to use words like disclose, reveal, illuminate.

No?

..Lois Shawver


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