Date: Sat, 29 Mar 2003 02:19:01 +0800
Subject: Being and Time-section 2



On Monday, March 24, 2003, at 06:43  AM, Paul Murphy wrote:

> Hi, I think we should get back to reading Sein und Zeit again, say the 
> pages
> 3-6.  I know this is a difficult time, and the war is v distracting, 
> but I
> took time today to watch 'The Hours' and to swim.  I urge you all to 
> now
> read poetry and listen to beautiful music, and get these images of
> destruction to the margins of existence.
> all best wishes,
> Paul Murphy

Is that pages 3-6 in the german edition? So far we've all commented on 
the first section and its 3 points about the traditional notion of 
being as universal, indefinable self-evidence but that takes us to page 
5 and section 2 on 'The formal structure of the question of being'. 
Here's a quick outline as I see it of the main points of this section 
(pp. 5-8) which we can discuss point by point if you all like (if I'm 
jumping ahead just flame me).

1 - If the question of being is to be explicitly formulated (gestellt) 
then we'll need to first clarify just what that questioning might 
entail. Seems like a reasonable suggestion...

2 - In inquiring about something one presumably already has an idea of 
what is to be investigated - in this case 'being' which is already 
understood in a vague kind of way. But this understanding is not only 
self evident in an implicit average everyday sense, when we try to 
explain the meaning of being we buy into all the explicit and implicit 
presuppositions of traditional philosophical notions of being.

This is the necessity of Destruktion, or critical dismantling (Abbau, 
or 'deconstruction'), but it's also our starting place cos we all more 
or less understand without even thinking about it what it means to say 
something or other 'is' something... yes?

3 - In terms of what the question asks about however, we have a problem 
cos 'being' does not name something, it's not a thing or an individual 
being. It's about the simple fact that there are things rather than 
nothing, where the question of being is about everything that can be 
said to be something or other. So it's not like any other question I 
can think of since we can't simply formulate it in the way we might 
anything else, cos what is it apart from everything and nothing? It 
can't be formulated in terms of an individual being, nor explained in 
terms of other beings, so Heidegger suggests it must be conceived of 
and exhibited in a unique way unlike anything else...

4 - Yet this also means that the subject matter of the question is 
nothing other than beings in general, cos what else is there? 
"Everything we talk about, everything we have in view, everything 
towards which we comport ourselves in any way, is being [seiend]; what 
we are is being and so is how we are. Being [Sein] lies in the fact 
that something is, and in its Being as it is [Sosein]; in Reality; in 
presence-at-hand; in subsistence; in validity; in Dasein; in the 'there 
is' [es gibt]" (p. 6-7).

5 - So the formulation of the question now turns on the problems of how 
to approach it, conceptually understand it and what beings should be 
used to explicate it. Heidegger suggests that these characteristics of 
the question so far point towards the inquirer oneself as that being 
(formally noted here as Dasein) which is to be investigated... or more 
precisely it's the asking of the question itself that is to be 
explicated as a way of accessing the question of the meaning of being.

I love the logic of this intro to BT, and I think Heidegger after 
setting up the question of being as a self-reflexive path of 
questioning never leaves this path throughout his entire career. It's 
the question concerning questioning (as Dasein)... and it's also more 
or less a faithful interpretation of Husserl's own conception of the 
starting point of phenomenology in the Logical Investigations where 
it's the analyst's own lived experience of phenomena that's in 
question. Heidegger is just a much clearer more systematic writer I 
think.

6 - And now we have the famous hermeneutic circle and the problem of 
formulating the meaning of being on the circular basis of a definition 
of the being of Dasein... Heidegger bypasses this problem by suggesting 
that the average understanding of being merely points us towards the 
general problem yet does not need to become an axiom from which we then 
derive the meaning of being. The question of being and its meaning 
involves a demonstration rather than deduction, where what's in 
question intimately involves the one asking the question. And here 
you've got the first suggestion of both the priority of Dasein (as 
one's own lived experience of asking the question) and the necessity of 
a phenomenological (or 'ownmost') method.

Cheers,

Malcolm



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