Date: Thu, 23 Jul 1998 06:58:32 -0700
Subject: Re: beyng & irony


Robert V. Scheetz wrote:

> Michael Staples:
> >I must be missing your mark, Bob. I see a difference between being
> >involved with my swinging a hammer, and my observing someone else --
> >baby or otherwise -- sucking a treat (or anything else). The
> >experiences
> >I have are mine. The experiences you have are not mine. There is no
> way
> >I can know your experience as a baby. And there is no way I can know
> my
> >experience as a baby. I can only presume....
>
> Steven Callihan:
> >The question, of course, would be whether there is a person, I,
> being,
> >Dasein, etc., already resident in the infant psyche peering out upon
> >the
> >world unprompted, or whether the person (Baby Dasein) comes into
> being
> >betwixt what is a bundle of drives and reflexes, on the one hand, and
> >the
> >conforming forces of family and society, on the other. Is Dasein
> rooted >in
> >our genetics, in other words, or is it rooted in our socio-cultural
> >histories?
>
> Steve and Michael,
> there's no question of biography or history, facticity.
> dasein's past is always the present of his past...
> dasein's babyhood always the presence-ing of
> the ecstatic temporality of his babybeing-there.

Sorry Bob, I'm just not following your point here.

> h's pt (at least one of them) with hammerring
> was how it instanced non-reflexive being-in...

You might be right about a baby being an example of "non-reflexive"
absorbed being-in-the-world similar to Heidegger's example of hammering.
Then again, you might not be right. If you were to have picked a rock or
a tree, we would have fairly solid ground to say what the rock or tree
is aware of or unaware of. We are on pretty safe ground saying the rock
or the tree is not Daseining. But with a baby, especially since you
yourself cannot really recall the experience of being a baby very well,
any sort of conclusions you draw about the being-there of a baby is
guesswork. Now that's all I'm saying, Bob -- that MY hammering is an
experience I can talk about as being MY own, while the only experience I
can talk about as my own, with respect to a baby, is my observation of
the baby's actions.

Michael S.



     --- from list heidegger-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---