Date: Sat, 22 Jul 1995 21:52:18 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: Re: division two, chapter i




David,

   I just re-read my note.  I said I don't consider myself an expert and 
I intend to challenge you. ha, ha.  Just a typo.  Sorry about that!  I 
meant I DON'T intend to challenge you.  I believe in your right, to say 
the least, to have a metaphysical interpretation of Heidegger.  Sorry for 
my misleading note.  Need to read them over before I send them.  For sure!

..Lois Shawver

On Sat, 22 Jul 1995, David Schenk wrote:

> 
> On Sat, 22 Jul 1995, Lois Shawver wrote:
> 
> > Yes.  I understand what you're saying, but I am surprised.  I hadn't had 
> > such an interpretation of B&T.  I don't consider myself an expert, 
> > though, and I intend to challenge you.  Still, I wonder if you would mind 
> > referringg me to a passage or so that leads you to this particular 
> > reading so I can see it the way you do.  What I'm missing is grounds for 
> > assuming that Heidegger is positing a metaphysical structure that shapes 
> > experience either as authenticity or inauthenticity.  Let me change 
> > that.  I don't want to see your 'grounds for assuming' it.  I just want 
> > to be able to see some piece of text that suggests that to you so I can 
> > understand your reading.
> 
> ----------------------------------
> 
> Well, I'm not sure that I'm prepared to get embroiled in a debate as to
> whether Heidegger's early philosophy is meant to get at the way things
> _really_ are.  Suffice it to say that I surely do think this is what he's
> doing.  I realize there is another strand of interpretation that makes a
> kind of global relativist or "perspectivalist" out of Heidegger, but since
> I am so profoundly unsympathetic to relativism and perspectivalism, and
> since I want to read Heidegger as charitably as I can, I do not interpret
> him as such a relativist.  I understand him to have been a systematic
> philosopher and a metaphysician in the noblest senses of these terms-- a
> metaphysician of a *broadly* Kantian variety (I say broadly because the
> last thing I'd want to do here is suggest more of a parallel than there
> really is). 
> 
> Anyway, as for my belief that authenticity and inauthenticity are grounded
> in basic ontological components of Dasein, I suppose the reaon for that is
> just that both authentic and inauthentic being-towards-death are
> possibilities of Dasein only insofar as both existence and fallenness are
> fundamental ontological (yeah, here I would say "metaphysical") structures
> of it.  Dasein can be inauthentic only insofar as fallenness into the
> they-self is part of its basic constitution, and it can be authentic only
> insofar as it is also essentially a kind of self-understanding.  I'm not
> sure what passages in the book would be most relevant to my comments here,
> but I expect you can see what motivates my interpretation. 
> 
> Anyway, I realize mine is probably not the most popular account of
> Heidegger's early philosophy, but I'm perfectly comfortable with that.
> 
> 
> Sincerely,
> 
> David Schenk.
> 
> 
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