Date: Mon, 31 Mar 2003 17:53:54 +0200
Subject: Re: Being and Time-section 2


Cologne 31-Mar-2003

Malcolm Riddoch schrieb Sat, 29 Mar 2003 02:19:01 +0800:

> 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.

I like that formulation:"...it's the analyst's own lived experience of
phenomena that's in
question."
It's not like in the social sciences, where observations have to be made,
data gathered and statistically analyzed.

Michael
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>
>
> 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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