What is death in Heidegger's Being and Time?
Unfortunately this will only make sense to those already interested in Heidegger... There is no "Heidegger" category, so I chose to put it in the general section.
What is the relevance of death in Heidegger's Being and Time? It seems to be a concept that is open to endless interpretation. But what is its function within the text itself? Throughout the death chapter he constantly refers to dasein's 'wholeness'. So this obviously key to any interpretation of death, and I think it's also a key to what he means by originary temporality. Here is a quotation:
"Underlying this biological-ontical exploration of death is a problematic that is ontological. We still have to ask how the ontological essence of death is defined in terms of that of life. In a certain way, this has always been decided already in the ontical investigation of death. Such investigations operate with preliminary conceptions of life and death, which have been more or less clarified. These preliminary conceptions need to be sketched out by the ontology of Dasein. Within the ontology of Dasein,
which is superordinate to an ontology of life, the existential analysis of death is, in turn, subordinate to a characterization of Dasein's basic state. The ending of that which lives we have called 'perishing'. Dasein too 'has' its death, of the kind appropriate to anything that lives ; and it has it, not in ontical isolation, but as codetermined by its primordial kind of Being. In so far as this is the case, Dasein too can end without authentically dying, though on the other hand, qua Dasein, it does not simply perish.
We designate this intermediate phenomenon as its "demise". Let the term "dying" stand for that way of Being in which Dasein is towards its death. Accordingly we must say that Dasein never perishes. Dasein, however, can demise only as long as it is dying. Medical and biological investigation into "demising" can obtain results which may even become significant ontologically if the basic orientation for an existential Interpretation of death has been made secure. Or must sickness and death in general even from a medical point of view-be primarily conceived as existential phenomena ?" (pg. 291)
What is the relevance of death in Heidegger's Being and Time? It seems to be a concept that is open to endless interpretation. But what is its function within the text itself? Throughout the death chapter he constantly refers to dasein's 'wholeness'. So this obviously key to any interpretation of death, and I think it's also a key to what he means by originary temporality. Here is a quotation:
"Underlying this biological-ontical exploration of death is a problematic that is ontological. We still have to ask how the ontological essence of death is defined in terms of that of life. In a certain way, this has always been decided already in the ontical investigation of death. Such investigations operate with preliminary conceptions of life and death, which have been more or less clarified. These preliminary conceptions need to be sketched out by the ontology of Dasein. Within the ontology of Dasein,
which is superordinate to an ontology of life, the existential analysis of death is, in turn, subordinate to a characterization of Dasein's basic state. The ending of that which lives we have called 'perishing'. Dasein too 'has' its death, of the kind appropriate to anything that lives ; and it has it, not in ontical isolation, but as codetermined by its primordial kind of Being. In so far as this is the case, Dasein too can end without authentically dying, though on the other hand, qua Dasein, it does not simply perish.
We designate this intermediate phenomenon as its "demise". Let the term "dying" stand for that way of Being in which Dasein is towards its death. Accordingly we must say that Dasein never perishes. Dasein, however, can demise only as long as it is dying. Medical and biological investigation into "demising" can obtain results which may even become significant ontologically if the basic orientation for an existential Interpretation of death has been made secure. Or must sickness and death in general even from a medical point of view-be primarily conceived as existential phenomena ?" (pg. 291)
Comments (72)
This general idea also happens to be in Feuerbach's criticism of Hegel and The Essence of Christianity as well. God shines as the image of the realization of all human possibilities. But a mortal man can only develop some of his godlike potential, neglecting the rest. He is therefore comforted by the infinite image of God -- which is "just" (in all its glory) the essence of humanity as a whole.
Authenticity is somewhat temporal, that we can anticipate death, we can recollect or envision, whereas inauthenticity is making things present and forgetting and this fear is the causal roots for the latter' subjective attitude (as in, why the inauthentic do not actually confront death); Dasein is basically a person who is able to recognise themselves as a subject authentically, to genuinely distinguish themselves as separate from the material world of modernity where they are thus able to distinguish the difference between their feelings or attitudes directed to the material world as being fundamentally flawed.
What are you on about?
That said, I googled and found on the first page Dreyfus criticizing Taylor Carmen's view of death or dying as the closing down of Dasein's possibilities. If memory serves, I just saw that idea in Innwood's Heidegger dictionary last night, too. As you may know, Kojeve fused Marx and Heidegger in his famous lectures. And of course Feuerbach, a German philosopher, may have influenced Heidegger, especially as a critic of Hegel and of metaphysics generally.
Quoting TimeLine
That's not what Heidegger meant. Dasein is more fundamental than merely human or person or any such a designation.
It was meant to be nothing but a statement of fact.
Quoting t0m
Ok, kind of sounds interesting but you do need to actually hone in on Carmen, methinks.
I think the only thing appaling at this point is the assumption that you know what Heidegger would be feeling. Anthropocentrism? Are you saying that Heidegger is not talking about being?
Quoting Agustino
So, Dasein is not existence? Yeah, this is getting a bit awkward.
I was referring to "what are you on about?" I suppose that was your second post in the thread.
Here's Dreyfus' quote of Carman, since I'm such a nice fellow.
[quote=D]
And Carman, therefore suggests that death is 'the constant closing down of possibilities, which is an essential structural feature of all projection into a future. He adds:
Such things die by dying to us, or rather by our dying to them as possibilities. Our possibilities are constantly dropping away into nullity, then, and this is what Heidegger means when he says — what might sound otherwise hyperbolic or simply false — that 'Dasein is factically dying as long as it exists' (295). To say that we are always dying is to say that our possibilities are constantly closing down around us.
[/quote]
http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~hdreyfus/189_s08/pdf/Carol%20White%20forward.pdf
Yes, he problematized the question of the meaning of being. That's prior to the possibility of any sort of anthropocentrism, and by reducing it to anthropocentrism and humanism you destroy that priority.
Quoting TimeLine
Yes, but it doesn't refer to the humanness of existence. It is true that only the human can be Dasein, as far as we know, but that doesn't mean that the phenomenon of Dasein is tied to the humanity of man.
I get what you are saying, but this is the dilemma that people face, the unique position we are in and this collision enables us to respond or react, making us different to any other species. That anthropocentrism only becomes displaced the moment we recognise authentically Dasein.
Quoting Agustino
Ok, that makes sense.
On another angle, though, there is this unavoidable humanism left in Dasein, this 'essence' despite what Heidegger imagines. What is left is 'man' or 'woman' or a kind of reappropriation. I fear there really is no escape.
:-|
:-|
This past, as that to which I run ahead, here makes a discovery in my running ahead to it: it is my past. As this past it uncovers my Dasein as suddenly no longer there; suddenly I am no longer there along such and such things, alongside such and such people, alongside these vanities, these tricks, this chattering. The past scatters all secretiveness and busyness, the past takes everything into the Nothing. The past is not some occurence, not some incident in my Dasein. It is its past, not some 'what' about Dasein, some event that happens to Dasein and alters it. This past is not a 'what' but a 'how', indeed the authentic 'how' of my Dasein. This past, to which I can run ahead as mine, is not some 'what', but the 'how' of my Dasein pure and simple.
[/quote]
That's from the lecture (not the book) The Concept of Time. Someone (can't remember who) called it the Ur-B&T, just as the ~100 page book of the same name is sold (I bought one) as the "first draft."
This is probably the most beautiful single work of philosophy I possess at the moment.
Dasein is authentically alongside itself, it is truly existent, whenever it maintains itself in this running ahead. This running ahead is nothing other than the authentic and singular future of one's own Dasein. In running ahead, Dasein is its future, in such a way that in this being futural it comes back to its past and present. Dasein, conceived in its most basic extreme possiblity of being, is time itself, not in time.
[/quote]
Kojeve, blending Hegel and Heidegger, had it : Man is the Concept is Time.
My pleasure. I didn't understand that last post. Care to clarify?
For the sake of brevity, there is a temporal link between Dasein and this anthropocentrism that he seeks to avoid, which is where Carmen' position is somewhat interesting. Derrida said this in The Ends of Man. "We see that Dasein, though not man, is nevertheless nothing other than man... a repetition of the essence of man permitting a return to what it was before [on this side of] the metaphysical concepts of Humanitas."
Thanks. I definitely read Dasein as a more holistic notion of human being. But still man. I don't mind, though. I really don't see how anthropocentrism can ever be avoided. On the other hand, I agree with Feuerbach that man is the god of man, so I don't think it needs to be. For me it's a question of shaping our self-image in a good or successful way. More accurately, I think this is done (ultimately or most authentically) on a personal level. We each shape our own notion of who we are, though admittedly in the context of or from within interpretations that preceded our own. We never get a blank canvas.
(Y)
[quote=Kojeve]
Therefore, [man] is
the empirical existence in the World of a Future that will never
become present. Now, this Future, for Man, is his death, that
Future of his which will never become his Present; and the only
reality or real presence of this Future is the knowledge that Man
has in the present of his future death. Therefore, if Man is Concept
and if the Concept is Time (that is, if Man is an essentially tem-
poral being), Man is essentially mortal; and he is Concept, that is,
absolute Knowledge or Wisdom incarnate, only if he knows this.
Logos becomes flesh, becomes Man, only on the condition of being
willing and able to die.
...
For History to exist, there must be not only a given reality, but
also a negation of that reality and at the same time a ("sublimated")
preservation of what has been negated. For only then is evolution
creative; only then do a true continuity and a real progress exist in
it. And this is precisely what distinguishes human History from a
simple biological or "natural" evolution. Now, to preserve oneself
as negated is to remember what one has been even while one is
becoming radically other. It is by historical memory that Man's
identity preserves itself throughout History, in spite of the auto-
negations which are accomplished in it, so that he can realize him-
self by means of History as the integration of his contradictory
past or as totality, or, better, as dialectical entity. Hence history is
always a conscious and willed tradition, and all real history also
manifests itself as a historiography: there is no History without
conscious, lived historical memory.
...
Man's Freedom is the actual negation
by him of his own given "nature" — that is, of the "possibilities"
which he has already realized, which determine his "impossibili-
ties" — i.e., everything incompatible with his "possibilities." And
his Individuality is a synthesis of his particularity with a uni-
versality that is equally his. Therefore Man can be individual and
free only to the extent that he implies in his being all the possi-
bilities of Being but does not have the time to realize and manifest
them all. Freedom is the realization of a possibility incompatible
(as realized) with the entirety of possibilities realized previously
(which consequently must be negated); hence there is freedom
only where that entirety does not embrace all possibilities in gen-
eral, and where what is outside of that entirety is not an absolute
impossibility. And man is an individual only to the extent that the
universality of the possibilities of his being is associated in him
with the unique particularity (the only one of its kind) of their
temporal realizations and manifestations. It is solely because he is
potentially infinite and always limited in deed by his death that
Man is a free Individual who has a history and who can freely
create a place for himself in History, instead of being content, like
animals and things, passively to occupy a natural place in the given
Cosmos, determined by the structure of the latter.
Therefore, Man is a (free) Individual only to the extent that
he is mortal, and he can realize and manifest himself as such an
Individual only by realizing and manifesting Death as well.
[/quote]
https://archive.org/stream/pdfy-xPoejl7ruL9jyW3_/KOJEVE%20introduction%20to%20the%20reading%20of%20hegel_djvu.txt
Just consider Dasein as ongoing Time/Duration (in Bergson's sense) which is taking on the possibilities of Life and Death. Each is a manifestation of the possibilities of Duration. So what we call death is just a transition (demise) into another state of possibilities of the Duration. We c make of each state as we do.
Hamlet's famous soliloquy touches upon this. Philosophers tend to be unnecessarily verbose.
Read this.
http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~hdreyfus/189_s08/pdf/Carol%20White%20forward.pdf
I was quietly thinking to myself that the gradual closing down of possibilities cannot be what Heidegger meant by death. Dreyfus's criticism of Carman's interpretation is spot on and devastating in my opinion.
Mon dieu!
I found it interesting, somewhat convincing, but not conclusive or exhaustive.
That one dies one's own death seems at least as central. The "they" can talk their talk, but I swim that last lap radically and beautifully alone. Death "individualizes Dasein down to itself." It opens up Dasein's absolute groundlessness. We exist against a background of the nothingness from which we emerged and to which we must return. From when to when is the how. The life given to us in its radical specificity is the unique ground of our finite possibilities, finite because we know that they are always already closing down.
Of course this is such a deep issue that it can't be just theoretical. But I would like to know how Heidegger understood himself --if we can assume that his thinking was ever fixed or exact on this issue.
Perhaps you could quote some highlights. I'm not a subscriber, and I'd prefer to respond to a particular point.
I agree absolutely. I also liked Carman's apt description of biological perishing and biographical demise.
I suspect the 'existential wholeness' aspect of death is what is most important, and that the mineness of death you mention receives its importance due to the centrality of this 'wholeness' aspect. Heidegger eventually says something like that it is through anticipatory resoluteness that dasein gains its existentiell wholeness; or that the ontology of death finds its existentiell attestation in anticipatory resoluteness. So regarding dasein's wholeness, which is what he is primarily questioning at this point in the book, and how he introduces the chapter, existential death (anticipation) is but one part it seems... Does this make sense?
I must confess that I haven't figured out what is meant by 'wholeness' in this context. Unless it means that seeing or revealing Dasein as a whole is made possible by anticipatory resoluteness? Is this about how the writing of Being and Time itself became possible? Just a guess.
On the other hand:
[quote = timjohnneal]
In this opening up Dasein can see itself as complete and know that life is there for us to live for ourselves. Dasein emerges from the ‘one’ to its own individual possibility.
[/quote]
and this
[quote= link]
The completeness of Dasein is not a matter of having a complete theory of it. It is the possibility of Dasein itself being 'complete' or 'whole,' that is, of Dasein's ability to be as an entity that 'exists' by taking a stand toward being.
[/quote]
https://books.google.com/books?id=7D1BDgAAQBAJ&pg=PT163&lpg=PT163&dq=dasein+wholeness+death&source=bl&ots=5nU3su1o4J&sig=lt0afumPo7AWppF-BSWVe6zPVCQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjvkvT9sIDXAhVHZCYKHSrACh4Q6AEITTAJ#v=onepage&q=dasein%20wholeness%20death&f=false
I can relate to that very much. Yet it seems vague. I think the two ideas are related. I see my completeness by understanding something like basic if not complete theory of Dasein. (All of this is conjecture humbly offered. Heidegger is my favorite right now, but I've only just started studying his own texts as opposed to interpreters.)
I am still having a hard time with this but I am starting to see what I could not see last night. My problem of this individualisation that emerges from Dasein is whether the latter is an actual completeness or whether there is a pathology to the concept or form itself, that ultimately we do not actually escape the content that underlies this groundlessness (perhaps even epistemically). From a Kantian angle, for instance, all that is left is the form of Good, but what this means is that we reduce our actions into this moral locus that we assume to be universal. Carmen, I think, is spot-on because of the fact that it must be a demise of these possibilities.
This is some good rock'n'roll along the same lines. The lyrics sure as hell aren't B&T, but the "feel" of authenticity and resoluteness is there.
"There ain't no guru who can see through your eyes."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Pttt0WCy9k
As opposed to the eyes of others? That's a good can of worms. But let's say we don't trust our own eyes. Is this not a trust of our own distrust?
[quote=Hegel]
Meanwhile, if the fear of falling into error introduces an element of distrust into science, which without any scruples of that sort goes to work and actually does know, it is not easy to understand why, conversely, a distrust should not be placed in this very distrust, and why we should not take care lest the fear of error is not just the initial error. As a matter of fact, this fear presupposes something, indeed a great deal, as truth...
[/quote]
"[In Heidegger] the death that approaches ... singles me out, singularizes me, [and] posits my being on its own, delivers me over to the force of life that is singularly my own. It is the shadow of nothingness approaching that gives me the sense of the end, the end of the life that is singularly my own to live, that disconnects me from the general and recurrent fields of tasks that are for others. The dark shadow of death closing in draws the line of demarcation between the possibilities and tasks that are recurrent, walling them off from me as possibilities and tasks that are for-others, and isolating the range of possibilities and tasks that are for-me. The sense of the end that anxiety contains, the sense of ending, is what assigns an end to every move, and to the whole trajectory of my life. lt is what determines
ends, ends that are for-me, and an ending for each of my moves. The irreversible direction that my own death assigns to me is what gives direction and directives to each move that is my own." (Alphonso Lingis, Sensation)
Of course we do modify our views. But we mostly act non-theoretically with the "trust" of know-how. I would also contend that we are always already invested in a "fundamental pose" with respect to what is wrong or right, with a more or less explicit notion of virtue. This "pose" can break down and require modification when confronted by "indigestible" experience or persuasive speech.
Connecting to the OP, I think this pose becomes more authentic as it attains a distance from what one say, one does. That I die alone helps to urge me on toward self-possession. The experts, even the famous intellectuals from whom we learn, can't do our dying for us. Heidegger himself has become part of the 'they' for intellectuals. One understands Heidegger this way. Heidegger himself, along the same lines, is an entity revealed to me in terms of my own future.
For me "authenticity" is about leaning less and less on the "they" as a ground, to reach less and less for external or 'alien' justifications. I aim to speak from the I as opposed to from the we. You may say that this I is born from the we. I agree. But I'm suspicious of attempts to obliterate this emergent individual as something that can be reduced to its origins.
Nice.
I agree. It does seem vague. I'm no expert either but I think the reason it looks vague to us is that we perhaps don't have a complete understanding of the phenomenon that Heidegger is getting at. Whereas he probably did. At the start of Div 2 he claims that our interpretation of the meaning of being will only be as good as our interpretation of dasein; the latter interpretation is supposed to function as the basis for the former interpretation. His claim is that for any interpretation to be accurate and not arbitrary, the phenomenon to be interpreted needs to be grasped as a whole. He then denies that we have the whole phenomenon (of dasein) in our grasp due to Div 1's focus on everydayness. How can we get the whole phenomenon in our grasp? This question instinctively leads to a discussion of death, which, it turns out, does not constitute dasein's wholeness on its own; this is the same as saying that authenticity is not constituted by death, or our response to it, alone.
I think the kind of wholeness he is grasping for through discussing death, guilt, etc. is the finite temporal unity of past and future in originary temporality. This is super complex and I don't have a sound understanding of originary temporality yet. But this is the path of his phenomenology in Being and Time as I see it. I doubt we can understand what he's getting at with death until we understand what he means by the primordially finite existential future/past of originary temporality. I may be wrong. But this how I'm currently thinking.
That sounds about right. But I'd leave open the possibility that he was trying to say something that wasn't easy to say. It's also possible that he didn't want to say it explicitly. He was already becoming famous, so possibly he chose his words very carefully. It's my impression that B&T was already revolutionary. But I'm just hypothesizing. I plan to keep reading and thinking.
From The Concept of Time [20 page lecture]
[quote=Heidegger]
Yet to what extent is time, as authentic, the principle of individuation, i.e., that starting from which Dasein is in specificity? In being futural in running ahead, the Dasein that on average is becomes itself; in running ahead it becomes visible as this one singular uniqueness of its singular fate in the possibility of its singular past. What is properly peculiar about this individuation is that it does not let things get as far as any individuation in the sense of the fantastical emergence of exceptional existences; it strikes down all becoming exceptional. In being together with death everyone is brought into the 'how' that each can be in equal measure; into a possibility with respect to which no one is distinguished; into the 'how' in which all 'what' dissolves into dust.
[/quote]
What is this 'how'? Is it how one "plays" the unique "hand" that one is dealt? Is no one distinguished because we can only be judged in terms of what we can hope to do with our varying live options? The healthy, rich kid with scholarly parents has different possibilities than Maggie, a girl of the streets. Is this 'what' that dissolves into dust some kind of universal 'they'-object? Is becoming exceptional struck down by the richness of every life lived in or as time?
I think I understand the becoming visible of the singular fate, more or less. I've been using the word "groundlessness," but I mean something like the risky venture of all uniqueness that doesn't hide behind some established abstraction or pre-interpretation of Dasein. To live the singular 'how' is perhaps to venture into the uncanny realm of creation even of standards that do not exist yet. The unique shape of one's disastrous and glorious past in all of its absurd detail is the only basis, the basis that was not chosen but can be now. I should say that that's only a plausible reading IMV.
I'm not claiming Levy means the same thing:
[quote= D A Levy]
...
if you want a revolution
grow a new mind
& do it quietly
if you can
return to your childhood
and kick out the bottom
then become a being
not dependent on words
for seeing
...
[/quote]
[quote=Heidegger]
Running ahead toward the ultimate possibility reveals the pastness of being-in-the-world, the possible 'no-longer-there'. There is no remaining within the world of concerned engagement. The world loses the chance to determine being-in in terms of what it deals with in its everyday concerns. By itself the world can no longer endow Dasein with being. What provides Dasein with a secure footing as distance and difference from others --who are there in the with-world and as the public realm --dissappears when the world fades into the background. The world recedes, as it were, from the contexts in which it is encountered in terms of its significance and becomes merely present-at-hand.
So being-in is directed to a state in which it finds that 'nothing whatsoever' can affect it, that is, its being before nothing. This nothing, as that which Dasein is faced with, throws Dasein's being back solely onto itself. This ownmost 'in itself' will no longer be 'there' in the world. This 'pastness' which is in each case one's own, pulls Dasein back from its lostness in the public averageness of 'one.''One' can no longer be the 'one.', one can no longer have others replace or choose in lieu of oneself. 'One's' capacity to cover things up distintegrates. Flight into the irresponsibility of nobody is cut off. 'Pastness' reveals the ultimate possiblity that Dasein is handed over to itself, in other words it becomes manifest that, if it wants to be what it is authentically, Dasein must exist of its own accord.
[/quote]
I'm going to be semi-authentic and put this against an un-hip 'fringe' thinker like Stirner. I now that Husserl was aware of him, so even influence is possible. "Edmund Husserl once warned a small audience about the "seducing power" of Der Einzige, but never mentioned it in his writing." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Stirner
I'm by no means trying to reduce Heidegger to Stirner. They are quite different. But both insisted on the human being as a who as opposed to a what. Both made something of nothing.
[quote=Stirner]
The unique, however, has no content; it is indeterminacy in itself; only through you does it acquire content and determination. There is no conceptual development of the unique, one cannot build a philosophical system with it as a “principle,” the way one can with being, with thought, with the I. Rather it puts an end to all conceptual development. Anyone who considers it a principle, thinks that he can treat it philosophically or theoretically and inevitably takes useless potshots against it. Being, thought, the I, are only undetermined concepts, which receive their determinateness only through other concepts, i.e., through conceptual development. The unique, on the other hand, is a concept that lacks determination and cannot be made determinate by other concepts or receive a “nearer content”; it is not the “principle of a series of concepts,” but a word or concept that, as word or concept, is not capable of any development. The development of the unique is your self-development and my self-development, an utterly unique development, because your development is not at all my development. Only as a concept, i.e., only as “development,” are they one and the same; on the contrary, your development is just as distinct and unique as mine.
But it is not true, as Stirner’s opponents present it, that in the unique there is only the “lie of what has been called the egoistic world up to now”; no, in its nakedness and its barrenness, in its shameless “candor,” (see Szeliga, p. 34) the nakedness and barrenness of concepts and ideas come to light, the useless pomposity of its opponents is made clear. It becomes obvious that the biggest “phrase” is the one that seems to be the word most full of content. The unique is the frank, undeniable, clear — phrase; it is the keystone of our phrase-world, this world whose “beginning was the word.”
The unique is an expression with which, in all frankness and honesty, one recognizes that he is expressing nothing. Human being, spirit, the true individual, personality, etc. are expressions or attributes that are full to overflowing with content, phrases with the greatest wealth of ideas; compared with these sacred and noble phrases, the unique is the empty, unassuming and completely common phrase.
[/quote]
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/max-stirner-stirner-s-critics
(I should stress that I find that political interpretations of Stirner miss what I'd call the point.)
Subscription is free for 30 days. Get the subscription, download the text, cancel it immediately. You'll still be able to use it for 30 days though, so you can download books and other things that you want. There's many books in the documents section.
There's nothing I want you to respond to in particular, I just think it's a different perspective from yours, and you'd find it interesting. It's a 30 page essay, it's a quick read.
This suggests to my that Dasein found its being in the world. It was alienated from its being, but this alienation is seductive in that it offers a secure footing as "distance and difference" from others. To be against the abyss is have all of this distancing and differing torn away. We are stark naked in the storm, and so, really, are all those expert voices. They can say what they want to the dying man. They'll be around to change their minds in the morning, possibility intact.
[quote=King Lear]
Unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art.
[/quote]
To bring in a little Stirner here (and I am only speculating or offering a possible interpretation) , the distancing and differencing (from others) is derived from one's projected being in the world of the they, the great stage of fools from beside the abyss. This projected is a crystallization of ego in terms of the day, which is a 'world-historical' ego. Dasein in everydayness is a respectable object with certain duties and privileges, anything but uncanny. Living the death of this world-historical or projected ego opens up the absolute "I" which is never an it and cannot be further specified. That's because it is freedom with a past, or a vivid set of determinate and specific possiblities "over" a determinate and specific null basis or past.
[quote=Heidegger]
This interpretation of the conscience passes itself off as recognizing the call in the sense of a voice which is 'universally' binding, and which speaks in a way that is 'not just subjective.' Furthermore, the universal conscience becomes exalted to a 'world-conscience,' which still has its phenomenal character of an 'it' and 'nobody', yet which speaks --there in the individual 'subject'- as this indefinite something.
But this public conscience --what else is it but the voice of the "they"?
[/quote]
Also:
[quote = Heidegger]
What is it that so radically deprives Dasein of any possibility of misunderstanding itself by any sort of alibi and failing to recognize itself if not the forsakenness with which it has been abandoned?
[/quote]
In my translation (M&R), there is only one bold-typed phrase. Is this true in the German? I don't know. But that phrase is freedom towards death.
[quote=Heidegger]
Anticipation reveals to Dasein its lostness in the they-self, and brings it face to face with the possibility of being itself, primarily unsupported by concernful solicitude, but of being itself, rather, in an impassioned freedom towards death --a freedom with has been released from the Illusions of the 'they', and which is factical, certain of itself, an anxious.
[/quote]
Is this not "dark," subversive?
Compare and contrast?
[quote= Stirner]
The unique should only be the last, dying expression (attribute) of you and me, the expression that turns into a view: an expression that is no longer such, that falls silent, that is mute.
The ideal “Man” is realized when the Christian apprehension turns about and becomes the proposition, “I, this unique one, am man.” The conceptual question, “what is man?” — has then changed into the personal question, “who is man?” With “what” the concept was sought for, in order to realize it; with “who” it is no longer any question at all, but the answer is personally on hand at once in the asker: the question answers itself.
[/quote]
[quote=Heidegger]
We wish to repeat temporally the question of what time is. Time is the 'how'. If we inquire into what time is, then one may not cling prematurely to an answer (time is such and such), for this always means a 'what'.
Let us disregard the answer and repeat the question. What happened to the question? It has transformed itself. What is time? became the question: Who is the time? More closely: are we ourselves time? Or closer still: am I my time? In this way I come closest to it, and if I understand the question, it is then taken completely seriously. Such questioning is thus the most appropriate manner of access to and of dealing with time as in each case mine. Then Dasein would be: being questionable.
[/quote]
By 'the possible no-longer-there' I take him to mean no longer 'in' the world. As he says in B&T being-in is largely determined by our moods/disposedness/attunements (or 'state-of-mind' in the M&R translation). The attunement in which one is no longer there in the world, and where the world becomes backgrounded, is angst. Is the past in the sense that he is getting at simply angst?
Try replacing 'pastness' with 'angst' in the below quotations. In my opinion it brings great clarity:
On the "Being" versus "being" issue, I think I can clarify a little. I'm not against mysticism, but I like my mysticism to be mysticism and my "labor of the concept" to be the "labor of the concept." By capitalizing the word being in English, a translator IMV encourages a mystical interpretation of this word.
The issue is only further complicated by Wittgenstein's notion that it is not how but that the world is that is "the mystical." I agree. The "brute fact" that there is a there there is mystical, lyrical, eerie. So the word "being" does connect to a "rational" mysticism, especially if one believes as I currently do that we are thrown into (at least epistemic) brute fact as we are thrown into our human cognition itself. Intelligibility itself remains mysterious. But as I currently understand Heidegger, he's trying to do conceptual work. He wants to make intelligibility itself as intelligible as possible. The "originary temporality of Dasein" is a clarification or simplification of this issue, a reduction to simplest terms. I'm still digesting B&T, so that's where I'm at so far. This seems pretty good: http://faculty.georgetown.edu/blattnew/topics/docs/temporality.pdf
I also like Dreyfus. Anyway, I think of an understanding of being as a basic framework for understanding entities or beings in general. These basic frameworks tend to be invisible. Phenomenology can unveil these frameworks to some degree. But we already always have some framework, and this is what makes the attempt to unveil this framework possible. I like dragging McLuhan into this. Beings are the message. The dominant understanding of being is the medium. The medium is more effective and more invisible the more we focus on the message. If philosophy is "really" or most properly ontology, then it aims to unveil the most general medium. An understanding of being is contingent, but it tends to function invisibly as necessary. So philosophy can be conceived as the revelation of the contingency of (apparent) necessity. But maybe this is "anti-philosophy," since a "theological" philosophy arguably operates in the reverse direction. "Time and chance" are reinterpreted as providence. This is the "best of all possible worlds," etc.
*I'm blending my other concerns with an in-progress digesting of B&T. So all of this is humbly offered. Maybe it lays the ground for further conversation.
I was trying to figure out "pastness" also. I think your theory is plausible. Something I recently found illuminating is relevant here, I think. Attunement seems to be on the right track. Blattner seems to think of it in terms of what we are already interested in.
http://faculty.georgetown.edu/blattnew/topics/docs/temporality.pdf
I'm not sure why the formatting of the quotes below is off. I tried to fix it. Couldn't. But at least you have some samples of the paper I linked to.
[quote=Blattner]
In other words, the possibility of being a musician is futural, not because it is merely
possible, rather than actual. Instead, it is a possibility that can never be actual, a future that can
never be present...Temporalizing does not mean a “succession” [“Nacheinander”] of the ecstases. The future is notlater than beenness, and this is not earlier than the present [Gegenwart]. (Heidegger 1979: 350)In other words, Dasein’s possibilities are not the sorts of items that can be actualized in thepresent. I never can have become a musician, even though I am now pressing ahead into being one. I call this claim the Unattainability Thesis (Blattner 1999). What does it mean to say that I cannot have become a musician? The point is not that
there are conditions on being a musician that I cannot satisfy (say, I have no rhythm). The point
is rather that understanding myself as a musician is not attempting to bring about some possible, future state of myself. The possibility of being a musician is not an end-state at which I aim; it is not something that I “sometime will be” (Heidegger 1979: 325). Being a musician is alwaysfutural with respect to what I am doing now. Of course, one can have attained the social statusof being a musician: the prerogatives, obligations, and expectations that devolve upon a personin virtue of occupying a certain station, role, career, or occupation in life. A social status,
however, is not the same as an existential possibility, what Heidegger calls an ability-to-be
(Seinkönnen). An existential possibility is a manner of self-understanding with which one is
identified in virtue of pressing ahead into it.
[/quote]
This touches on one of my favorite themes (and in fact on Stirner). To be futural is to "incarnate" a role. To be futural is the "how." My future does not approach me "from" the future, sliding at me as I stand in the present. It is the ideal how, the "hero myth," or "the fundamental pose." It is the "statue" of my ideal self that I want to "maintain." I never achieve it. It is a pose that must be continually reaffirmed. Blattner's reading reminds me of Sartre. In order to maintain this pose (true artist, good father, profound philosopher) I have to act and react in the present in a certain way. If Blattner is right, then "future" is a somewhat deceptive or confusing term. But if you read the whole paper, you'll see IMV why is is finally justified. What gives continuity to our lives? As Rorty says, we want to be able to describe our past as a story of progress or ascension. "Personal" time is primordial. It involves the "basic pose" or "ownmost" understanding of existence. Then there's "world time" and "nature time," both of which are derivative in a certain sense from personal time. Or perhaps personal time and world time are equiprimordial, and this is the tension between authentic and inauthentic modes. We "sink" into world-time away from our ownmost pose or mission, but we buoyantly return to personal time.
[quote=Blattner]
Just as the “ahead” in “being-ahead-of-itself” describes a future that can never come to be
present, so Heidegger argues that the “already” in “being-already in a world” picks out a past
that never was present. Dasein’s originary past is, recall, its attunements, the way things already
matter to it. I am always already “thrown” into the world and into my life, because I am always
attuned to the way it matters to me. These attunements are the “drag” that situates and
concretizes the “thrust” of my projection. These attunements, however, are not past events.
They do not belong to the sequential past, as the various episodes of my life-history do. In
Heidegger’s language, they are not “bygone” (vergangen). They belong, rather, to the existential
or originary past, to my “beenness” (Gewesenheit). My attunements were not at one time
present, after which they slipped into the past. Rather, at every moment that an attunement
characterizes me, even at its first moment, I am already thrown into it; it is already past.
[/quote]
I like "drag" in the above description. One might think also of inertia or momentum. If existence is what it understands itself to be and it understands itself to be an ideal how or "future," then the other part of this structure is the "rest of the train." The future or the how is the "head" of the snake, the cutting edge. Remember the tubes in Donnie Darko?
[quote=Blattner]
come to be present and a past that never was present.
But Why Call It “Time?”
At this point one might certainly suspect that something has gone wrong. One might
argue that if Dasein’s possibilities are the sorts of things that cannot come to be present, then
they are not futural either, and if not futural, then not distinctively temporal. In other words, one
might urge that if the argument above holds, the sense of “ahead” in “being-ahead-of-itself” is
only metaphorically temporal. Heidegger acknowledges the force of this consideration, when he
concedes that his interpretation of Dasein “does violence” to the everyday understanding of
human existence (Heidegger 1979: 311). Still, he believes that his interpretation is required by
the phenomena.
Heidegger answers that originary temporality explains time, and for that reason it
deserves the title originary time. So, when we have shown that the “time” that is accessible to Dasein’s intelligibility is not originary and, what is more, that it arises out of authentic temporality, then we are justified, in accordance with the proposition, a potiori fit denominatio, in labeling temporality, which has just been exhibited, originary time. (Heidegger 1979: 329)
Time as we encounter it in our everyday experience is not originary. How do we encounter time
in our everyday experience? Heidegger distinguishes, in fact, two sorts of everyday time, worldtime and time as ordinarily conceived. Time as we ordinarily conceive it (der vulgäre
Zeitbegriff) is time as the pure container of events. Heidegger may well build the term
“conceive” into its name, because he wants to emphasize that when we disengage from our
ordinary experience and talk about and contemplate time as such, we typically interpret time as
such a pure container, as the continuous medium of natural change.
[/quote]
If Blattner is right, that explains why B&T is so confusing.
This goes back to the original issue of what living one's death makes possible. I think it makes the fundamental pose or originary time visible. From a Stirnerian/ironist perspective, I'd say that it is too painful or foreclosed to see this structure from the outside as long as one is invested in a particular myth. Because seeing the structure unveils the contingency of that pose. In other words, to understand the "the sacred" in most general terms is to (at the same time, as the same "action" or insight) demystify every particular pose. One "dies" into ironism. But one can still come back into the world and invest in it without completely losing that terrible distance glimpsed via angst. One foot in the grave, the other at the very center of life.
[quote=Blattner]
The prospect of resigning one’s self-understanding points toward an ominous threat that
Heidegger believes looms constantly before Dasein, what he calls “death,” but which is not
exactly what we normally call “death.” In II.1 Heidegger defines death as the “possibility of the
impossibility of existence” and characterizes it as a “way to be Dasein.” Heideggerian death is a
way to be Dasein and, therefore, not non-existence per se. The latter, the end or ending of a
human life, Heidegger calls “demise” (Ableben), in contrast with death (Tod). For clarity’s sake,
I will call Heideggerian death “existential death.” Existential death is the condition in which
Dasein is not able to be or exist, in the sense that it cannot understand itself, press ahead into any possibilities of being. Existential death is a peculiar sort of living nullity, death in the midst of
life, nothingness. What would it be like to suffer existential death? To be unable to understand
oneself is not for one’s life to cease to matter altogether. As Heidegger says early on in Being
and Time, Dasein’s being is necessarily at issue for it. The issue, Who am I?, How shall I lead
my life?, matters to me, but when existentially dead no possible answer matters. All answers to
these questions are equally uninteresting. This is what Heidegger calls anxiety, although on its
face it sounds more like what we today call depression: the total insignificance of the world,
including the entire matrix of possible answers to the question, Who am I? Anxiety and
existential death are two sides of the same coin: global indifference that undercuts any impetus
to lead one sort of life or another.To tie all this together, Heidegger accords the phenomenon of existential death ontological importance, because it signals something about the very nature of humanpossibilities. If existential death looms constantly as a threat to who I am, then who I am, my possibilities, can never characterize me in any settled way. If they did, then I could never find
myself unable to be them. Hence, my originary future is not the sort of thing that can be present,
not a property that can positively characterize me in the way in which a determinate height or
hair color, or even a determinate social status, can characterize me. It is a future that is not later
than, that does not succeed, the present.
[/quote]
I did look into Voeglin, though not that paper. I like him. It's possible that you've mistaken me for a Kojevian of some stripe, but I'm far more apolitical than utopian. I'm just willing to learn from those who were and are intensely political. My notion of the "transcendence" is edgy to the degree that it is edgy precisely in its distance from the respectability of civic virtue. It is open to being an "idiot" or "private person." It is open in the sense of not assuming that "idiocy" is "bad."
Quoting t0m
I'm not so sure about this... Heidegger does describe a 'temporality of circumspective concern', which is more closely related to world time than primordial temporality, and the Donnie Darko tubes are probably a nice illustration of this. Regarding primordial temporality, which is what Blattner is discussing here, I don't think the metaphor of a train will really work. This is because the train metaphor and the Donnie Darko tubes imply a temporal succession and primordial temporality is not successive. By "drag" I think Battner is only illustrating the thrownness that structures our projection into an existentially unattainable for-the-sake-of-which. This thrownness is our existential determinateness, or in a word, mattering. Maybe "drag" was not the best choice of word for him to use...
I was thinking about the 'how' issue you raised above. I would disagree that the 'how' is anything ideal, it is rather existential. Perhaps one way to think about it is that normal successive time is characterised as a 'what', whereas non-successive primordial temporality is characterised by the 'how'. Or rather, perhaps non-successive primordial temporality and the 'how' are the same thing. Perhaps in that early lecture he was still grasping for his original conception of primordial temporality, and the 'how' was a temporary placeholder for it? In the Concept of Time he says:
"...the fundamental character of this entity is its 'how'." (pg. 13) Or in other words, Dasein is primordial temporality, in B&T language.
I agree. I chose a bad metaphor. What I was thinking about is the tension between the "future" and "pastness" within a "present" structure. But now Kojeve comes to mind. The "how" is mostly inherited from the genuine past, so maybe "pastness" is the content of the how. I picked up Carol White's book recently and (as you may remember in the paper), she wrote of marginal practices or understandings of being brought to centrality. So perhaps the "unity" involves not a tension or opposite but something more like form versus content (though I'm not happy with that either.) In any case, Blattner's "un-attainability thesis" seems quite important if true.
[quote=B]
The ahead-of-itself is grounded in the future. Already-being-in
... announces in itself beenness
[/quote]
Is pastness or beenness just the announcement of being-in? Is this just a stressing of always alreayd being in the middle of things? I seem to recall Heidegger insisting that the how is never the how-in-itself. Is it like a rose in steel dust? Is it the way that being-in is shaped by ahead-of-itself?
Quoting bloodninja
That's a good point. Perhaps the "how" is the whole of non-successive primordial temporality. I do find it hard to ignore something like the "ideal" having a deep place in Dasein. What I have in mind is the role that one is identified with, the "for-the-sake-of." Why, for instance, are we interpreting Heidegger? How does that fit into our big plan for ourselves or into our individual understandings of being?
[quote=B]
Existence is that aspect of Dasein’s being that it always is what it understands itself to be.
[/quote]
It "just is" good. We can find reasons if asked, but even there we already find it good to be able to find reasons. In my view, this "how" of being able to find reasons would be necessarily self-subverting. It gives birth to philosophy.
[quote=Blattner]
In other words, Dasein’s possibilities are not the sorts of items that can be actualized in the present. I never can have become a musician, even though I am now pressing ahead into being one. I call this claim the Unattainability Thesis (Blattner 1999). What does it mean to say that I cannot have become a musician? The point is not that there are conditions on being a musician that I cannot satisfy (say, I have no rhythm). The point is rather that understanding myself as a musician is not attempting to bring about some possible, future state of myself. The possibility of being a musician is not an end-state at which I aim; it is not something that I “sometime will be” (Heidegger 1979: 325). Being a musician is always futural with respect to what I am doing now.
....
This world-time now-structure is, however, embedded in originary temporality as merely
one of the latter’s ecstases.
We wield equipment in order to tackle tasks only because we understand ourselves the way we do: I apply contact cement to my disintegrating formica countertop, because I understand myself as a homeowner. In Heidegger-speak, the in-which of involvement “goes back to” (zurückgehen) the for-the-sake-of-which of self-understanding.
[/quote]
This for-the-sake-of-which is the "fundamental pose" or self-interpretation. So the for-sake-of-which explains the in-order-to which explains nature time and world time?
Conceiving the future as a what in the container of non-primordial time obscures this how? Is the self-obscuring of the how? The revelation of the how is only a possibility for Dasein. Heidegger himself is one understanding that existence can have of itself?
If Blattner is right, then originary temporality is not time-like. It only "earns" the time-like metaphor-system from its ability to explain "degenerative" or less primordial time (time proper in the sense of ordinary understanding.) Does this make sense to you?
Why do humans bother to structure time as they do? Our use of time as a sequence of nows is part of a how that is more primordial than these nows. Not it from bit, but now from how?
It could indeed be. Or maybe death reveals or clarifies this unattainability?
[quote=B]
death and anxiety reveal important structures of Dasein’s being. That Dasein can find itself unable to understand itself and project forth into a way of life, that it can find itself equally indifferent to all human possibilities, shows that it is capable of living as nothing, as a question without even a provisional answer. This, in turn, forces us to recognize that the possible ways to be Dasein are not possible as potentially actualizable, that Dasein presses ahead into a future that never can become present. The latter implies, finally, that originary temporality is not successive.
[/quote]
Just to be clear, I wasn't accusing you of mysticism. I was just explaining my dislike of the capitalization. I read Steiner's book on Heidegger with pleasure, yet I didn't come away with a clear conceptual picture of what Heidegger was getting at. I knew that language and being were important, that the being-question was important. But I don't remember getting anything like what Blattner and others provided. Now I've switched to the Stambough translation and like it much better. So I'm feeling my way in to a [conceptual] thinker who seems quite different to me than the fuzzy picture in Steiner's book. But I may just finally be getting at just how deep and meaningful the question was to begin with. Dreyfus helped. I started to think in terms of understandings of being, of mostly invisible "frameworks" that disclose entities in the first place so that "normal" science can begin.
I also agree with your main point. I was first exposed to Heidegger via Rorty and Kojeve. Rorty stressed the idea in your quote. I suppose that "finitude" added to that notion would include the denial that there is a final or right or eternal way of understanding being. In another lingo, we can't see outside of our own form of life. Or perhaps we can't see very clearly out of our own form of life. We'd have to be able to see a little outside this form of life or inherited pre-interpretation of being to believe that others understood being differently.
I think that is roughly how it unfolds in B&T
Quoting t0m
Because nobody would understand what the time was otherwise haha. But I think Blattner/Heidegger argue that originary temporality is more or less the framework that makes sense of, or structures, world time. So world time, I think, or perhaps the temporality of circumspective concern, is the "making present" within the non-successive, finite future/past of originary temporality. In other words world time is contained within originary temporality. I think Blattner mentioned that in the article, he calls it the "world-time embeddedness thesis".
Quoting t0m
Doesn't the ideal in the sense you are using it imply a conscious awareness of it? I'm not so sure that is the level at which Heidegger is doing his phenomenology. I'm not denying that we don't all have ideals.
Right. But this orginary time seems to be quite un-time-like, except for its ability to explain time as we (vaguely) conceive it. So the "future" and "past" and "present" of originary time (as I'm understanding Blattner) only get their misleading names this way. The idea of existence as "pure act" comes to mind. The original future, present, and past are just aspects of a unity. That's what I'm picking up. What is the structure of this unity? of this "how"?
Quoting bloodninja
Do you mean the making present of entities? That makes sense to me. We have a making present of meaningful beings, understood against the background or horizon of time in its various modes. Is the pressing forward of future just a spin on this presencing? A spin on the meaning of the entity disclosed? This "spin" is most basically explained by the for-the-sake-which of self-understanding? That seems plausible to me.
Quoting bloodninja
I didn't mean to suggest that such ideals must be conscious. Of course I realize that Heidegger is largely significant by digging much deeper than (self-)consciousness. I think Dreyfus even stresses that the 'for-sake-of-which' terminology was invoked to avoid an interpretation in terms of conscious motive.
I suggest that what I'd call ironism is a phenomenology of motive. It digs up or unveils what mostly functions as an invisible framework. As I see it, this "bringing-to-light" of a framework is simultaneously a distancing from or negation of the framework. The "necessary" becomes contingent and therefore optional. We could define freedom in terms of this "corrosion" of merely-apparent-in-retrospect necessity. If Blattner is right and I understand him correctly, then Heidegger is (among other things) doing "ironism" on a deeper level. But he's more interested in being, so it's only a station on the way for him. If philosophy is or should be fundamental ontology, then (as I understand it) he's doing a "pre-science" of the most fundamental framework. Nevertheless, giving the primordial future a key position in his theory does suggest a somewhat neglected connection to The Irony.
[quote=Blattner]
This, in turn, forces us to recognize that the possible ways to be Dasein are not possible as potentially actualizable, that Dasein presses ahead into a future that never can become present.
[/quote]
This connects to Sartre, too. It reminds me of the (impossible) desire of the for-itself to have substantial being without losing its freedom.
In the text itself, the sentences following endnote 29 read: "[In anticipating death...] There is no remaining in the world of concerned engagement.... [others] disappear when the world fades into the background." And in the next paragraph he writes: "So being-in is directed to a state in which it finds that 'nothing whatsoever' can affect it, that is, its being before nothing. This nothing, as that which dasein is faced with, throws dasein's being back solely on to itself. This ownmost 'in-itself' will no longer be 'there' in the world. This 'pastness', which is in each case one's own, pulls dasein back from its lostness in the 'one'."
From what I've quoted above, Heidegger seems to be talking about attunement/being-in. And he seems to be more or less equating this with pastness, to me. Do you read him differently?
This Farin translation is a great text! I plan to read it properly, but I have been quite busy the past few days. It was very interesting what you said above regarding ironism. It's actually the first time I have come across that term. Rorty is definitely on my reading list!
May I cheat and quote from The History of the Concept of Time? I realize that this is a slightly earlier work, but I find that the lectures are (as might be expected) clearer.
[quote=Heidegger]
By suicide I surrender the possibility precisely as possibility....The possibility is however just what it is only when it is left standing, that is, when it is left standing before us as impending. A relationship of being to it must be such that I am precisely the possibility itself...The being must run forward toward the possibility, which has to remain what it is. I come as it were into the nearest nearness to it. But as I approach it in this way, the possibility does not become a world, say, but becomes more and more a possibility and more authentically only a possibility.
In dying, the world is only that which has nothing more to say to my own being. In dying,...the world is that upon which Dasein is no longer dependent...
[Dasein is thereby] purely and simply thrown back upon itself, so absolutely that even being-with in its concretion of 'to be with others' becomes irrelevant...[The] being is now transposed authentically directly to the 'I am.' Only in dying can I to some extent say absolutely, 'I am.'
[/quote]
How about this interpretation? I am the possibility of my death because death is that which can 'carve out' the I from the world it is usually immersed in. It is the vividness of this possibility that 'liberates' the 'I am' from the 'we are.'
From Ontology: The Hermeneutics of Facticity:
[quote=Heidegger]
The everydayness of Dasein has its Dasein there for itself and seeks it on the path of heeding what the others say about it, what its pursuits look like to the others, how the other others in advance come to appearance within it pursuits.
[/quote]
This reminds me of Kundera's Immortality, which features a dying Goethe experience a new authenticity in his freedom from his own fame, his own legacy. A seductive young woman positions herself as a sort of parasite on his legacy, endearing herself to him and (once he becomes wary) his mother. This disturbs him until the possibility of death becomes so vivid that he sees that this legacy means nothing to him. He lets it go. His vanity shatters against the vividness of the looming abyss, which lights up the world in a new way as...a great stage of drowsy fools?willfully blind to the abyss and their own ragged nakedness before that darkness? Is this darkness not the inmost core of the I in its the way? I am truly I myself 'only' as this possibility nears as such. Or perhaps I am in general possibility. I experience myself as possibility. Death is the greatest and most terrible possibility, one might say. So I experience myself as myself precisely here --at least at my most 'whole' or separate.
In my opinion, there is also the possibility of taboo sex and violence lurking in Heidegger's words. We are largely constrained by a commitment to the future. This is not to say that we would be monster in general without such an investment. I suggest rather that we would cease tolerating some situations in the name of an intact future.. A mundane example: we show up for work on 3 hours of sleep or no sleep. But we wouldn't do this if we had only a week to live. A less mundane example: a married man or woman is fairly happy, happy enough. It's an uncertain venture to start again, etc. But then this man or woman almost dies and (maybe) decides to no longer compromise and take the risk for something ideal rather than OK. Or an aging man for whom death becomes realer if not imminent dates a girl 'too young' for him in his friends' eyes. Or a man dying of cancer 'allows' himself to lose his temper at an insult. He is already 'going down,' so he is no longer motivated to swallow his outrage and be a respectable citizen. Professor Heidegger doesn't go into this, but he does go on to join the militaristic Nazi party.
[quote=Heidegger]
The certainty of this possibility [of death] is seized when every other possible can-be of mine is set apart from it, that is, when the resoluteness toward itself is such that it is the source of the possibility of this or that action. If Dasein in forerunnning can bring itself into such an absolute resoluteness, it means that in this running forward toward its death Dasein can make itself responsible in an absolute sense. It 'can' choose the presupposition of being of itself, that is, it can choose itself. What is chosen in this choice is nothing other than willing to have a conscience. ...Forerunning is the choice of willing to have a conscience.
...
As an active being-with with others and as such, Dasein is eo ipso guilty, even when --and precisely when --it does not know that it is unjuring another or destroying him in his Dasein. With the choice of being willing to have a conscience, I have at the same time chosen to have become guilty. The genuine kind of being of Dasein corresponding to its utmost and ownmost possibility (the ownmost being-ahead-of-itself enacted by itself) is what we have characterized as the forerunning of willing to have a conscience, which at the same time means choosing the essential guilt of Dasein itself, insofar as it is.
[/quote]
So what do we have here? Somehow making the possibility of death vivid as possibility is also a choosing of 'the essential guilt of Dasein itself.' How can we make sense of this? If the 'one' is the largely unwritten Law, then personality as such is 'sin.' One of life's horrors for a sensitive heart is that what one does actually matters. I can hurt others, intentionally or not. I can do that which cannot be undone. Terrible crime is possible along with just accidentally running over someone's dog. Is this not 'original sin'?
But we also have this choosing of one's self, of taking personal responsibility. We don't speak from the anyone and everyone. We don't speak in a way that hides from our own speaking. We speak as agents who know our own guilt in this same speaking. In my view, 'authenticity' is correctly understood as an 'ego ideal' or virtue, despite protestations to the contrary. Or rather it describes a mode that Heidegger strove to remain in, a mode that made Heidegger as original and daring philosopher possible. Note in the underlined part that resoluteness makes (new) actions possible. Real resoluteness opens possibilities that are not just idle fantasies but even revolutions. In my view, we have a theory of the 'great' human here, liberated from the groundlessness and conformity of the they by a vision of death that nullifies their authority --which is only the not-yet-great human's fleeing from his own death-guilt. Ontological death is guilt in that the I is guilt and that the I is death as possibility --or most intensely I-like in the light of this vivid possibility.
It's the last section of this beautiful book (translated by Kisiel).
[quote =Heidegger]
36. Time as the being in which Dasein can be its totality
But forerunning into my ownmost possiblity of being is nothing but the being of my ownmost coming to be being. Being guilty, which is posited in and with it, is the being of my ownmost having been. This being of having-been is the past, such that in such a being I am nothing but the future of Dasein and with it its past. The being, in which Dasein can be its wholeness authentically as being-ahead-of-itself, is time.
Not 'time is' but "Dasein qua time temporalizes it being." Time is not something which is found outside somewhere as a framework for world events. Time is even less something which whites away inside in consciousness. It is rather that which makes possible the being-ahead-of-itself-in-already-being-involved-in, that is, which makes possible the being of care.
The time which we know everyday and which we take into account is, more accurately viewed, nothing but the Everyone to which Dasein in its everydayness has fallen. The being in being-with-one-another in the world, and that also means in discovering with one another the one world in which we are, is being in the Everyone and a particular kind of temporality.
[/quote]
The underlined part suggests that the authentic 'I' is born from death as possibility. Or the I 'is' (again) the possibility of death. Is this not Hegelian?
[quote = Hegel]
The presentation of itself, however, as pure abstraction of self-consciousness consists in showing itself as a pure negation of its objective form, or in showing that it is fettered to no determinate existence, that it is not bound at all by the particularity everywhere characteristic of existence as such, and is not tied up with life...And it is solely by risking life that freedom is obtained; only thus is it tried and proved that the essential nature of self-consciousness is not bare existence, is not the merely immediate form in which it at first makes its appearance, is not its mere absorption in the expanse of life. Rather it is thereby guaranteed that there is nothing present but what might be taken as a vanishing moment — that self-consciousness is merely pure self-existence, being-for-self. The individual, who has not staked his life, may, no doubt, be recognized as a Person; but he has not attained the truth of this recognition as an independent self-consciousness.
[/quote]
As I read it, the authentic person is 'alone' in his own time. He has time. Time (the everyone) does not have him. He is not caught in the hurriedness, the gossip, the pre-interpretedness. His nakedness before the vividness of the possibility of death allows for a destruction of that which covers over his singular and guilty being-ahead-of-himself-in-already-being-involved. He is revealed to himself as a singular, guilty, dying uniqueness that cannot get behind itself to start fresh or flee to the irresponsible timeless universal.
[quote=Heidegger]
Putting forth questions --questions are not happenstance thoughts, nor are questions the common 'problems' of today which 'one' picks up from hearsay and book learning and decks out with a gesture of profundity. Questions grow out of a confrontation with 'subject matter.' And subject matter is there only where eyes are.
It is in this manner that a number of questions will have to be 'posed' in this course, and all the more so considering that questioning has today fallen out of fashion in the great industry of 'problems.' Here one is in fact secretly at work abolishing questioning altogether and intent on cultivating a modesty of blind faith. One declares the sacrum [sacred] to be an essential law and is thereby taken seriously by one's age, which in its frailty and impotence has need for such a thing. One stands up for nothing more than the trouble-free running of the 'industry'! Having become ripe for the organization of mendacity, philosophy interprets its corruption as 'the resurrection of metaphysics.'
Companions in my searching were the young Luther and the paragon Aristotle, whom Luther hated. Impulses were given by Kierkegaard, and Husserl opened my eyes. This for those who 'understand' something only when they reckon it up in terms of historical influences, the pseudo-understanding of an industrious curiosity, i.e., diversion from what is solely at issue in this course and what it all comes to. One should make their 'tendency of understanding' as easy as possible for them so that they will perish of themselves. Nothing is to be expected of them. They care only about the pseudo.
[/quote]
Is Heidegger...King Slender? Because he's about to break the pseudos on daddy's knee. The primordial must reached by the penetration of its covering-over by a real man, a long-schlonged thinker of the first-most water.
(I intend this in a neutral tone, neither praising nor blaming.)
A footnote indicates:
[quote=editor]
The "Forward' was not delivered in this course.
[/quote]
The How tends to be concealed by the What. The medium, in other words, tends to be concealed by the message. Our comportment toward things tends to go unnoticed , precisely because the thing dominates.
The past that lives (the primordial past) is exactly this un-thematized How or pre-grasping. This pre-grasping includes pre-conception. Phenenomological destruction or deconstruction draws this pre-conception out and makes it explicit. Only this way can it 'go backward' and recover the force of the elemental words and/or experience anew the choices (as choices) that shaped this usually unthematized and quietly dominant How.
Heidegger (as I understand it) only allowed Kant the possibility of having glimpsed primordial time (which involves an understanding of the primordial past as the 'how'.)
[quote=Heidegger]
Perhaps it is no accident that Kant determined the fundamental principle of his ethics in such a way that we call it formal. He perhaps knew from a familiarity with Dasein itself that it is its 'how. It was left to contemporary prophets to organize Dasein in such a way that the 'how' is covered up.
[/quote]
This reminds me of 'formal indication,' which Kisiel emphasizes in The Genesis of Being and Time.
On another, related them, I think 'authentic Dasein' is something like a personification of radical phenomenology. Just as tarrying with the negative leads to the Hegelian standpoint, living the death of concerned immersion in the What of the present in personal death as possibility makes visible the how. The how of the day, the shared living past of the they, is simultaneously made visible and contingent.
This how or pre-grasping is (as I understand it) the medium through which entities are understood in there that-they-are and what-they-are, which is to say being.
Since the how 'evolves,' so does being. Being, the deepest framework, is apparently unstable. The individual human being can attain clarity about his own temporality and understand the temporality of the they --world-historical temporality.
[quote=Heidegger]
In doing so it is not that one has become 'tired' of previous philosophy and would now set about thinking up a new system and try out whether it not be possible, for a change, in this way. It is not decisive whether that which is to be obtained is shockingly new or whether it is old, or whether from out of this a system is really to be built or not. Something else is at stake, namely to lead philosophy from out of its alienation back to itself (phenomenological destruction). (The genuine is always new because the old has always in some sense necessarily become un-genuine for us. )
[/quote]
from Phenomenology of Intuition and Expression.
As I read him, this overcoming of alienation involves a union of the 'spiritual' and the scientific. That the scientific at its most radical could exist apart from the 'spiritual' perhaps the superstition of a half-dead 'science.' Of course I have the pre-science or ur-science of radical phenomenology in mind. I'm thinking of spirit as Geist as living time. The 'infinite' standpoint (a fantasy the depends upon a covering up of the temporality of being) is a desiccating aim. And yet it may be the unavoidable and proper aim, in some sense. Our thrust against finitude is maybe the essence of philosophy, and unveiling the how (the living past or 'being' functioning as the framework disclosing entities) is itself an attempt to grab the unchanging formal structure. For me this feels like a radicalization of Kant and Hegel. It's formal like Kant, but the interpretative framework is dynamic as in Hegel. But it's more visceral. It moves in the twilight of the pre-theoretical. It aims at the dark origins of the theoretical.
I speculate that 'pastness' is not really about an endless succession of nows but just a fancy way of talking about the possibility death. If death is intended as a first-person experience, then of course we can only intend death as possibility. How I do experience death as a possibility? For one thing, I imagine the world going on without me. I have become a part of the past. I can't do anything anymore. I am neutralized, thrown away.
Even though our actual death as demise is in the future, it exists (authentically) as vivid possibility in the present. The more vivid this possibility, the less inauthentic the timing of this death. The time 'between' now and my demise 'shrinks' to nothing. What does the ordinary measuring of time mean compared to the unmeasurable possibility of my death? The clocks melt. The covering-over of idle talk is blown away like dead leaves in the cold wind from an abyss become here-and-now. There's an ecstasy in this shattering-against along with the terror.
I think you're right about attunement being central here. The being-in as being-with is lost. Dasein is no longer 'there' in the world because he has 'surfaced' from the usual immersion. Or rather this is two ways of saying the same thing. Death as vivid possibility exists via an eerie attunement in which Dasein experiences its wholeness/separateness as an individual Dasein. I think this also makes the 'how' of the they visible or seeable-from-outside. We can't look at the bottom of the foot we are standing on --that's holding us up. My solitary death also allows me to view my culture from the outside --to some degree. The seeing-of-the-how is critical, non-neutral. So conformity (immersion in its benefits and safety) is a big part of the cover of the how. For me it's hard to ignore the old theme of facing death heroically here. The phenomenologist is a kind of warrior. 'Real' philosophy takes courage. It risks its own sanity, in a certain sense. It ventures into the untamed frontier alone. But this frontier is largely behind us in our dark origins or beneath us in the dark foundations of our lighting-things-up.
Please forgive me if I'm coming off as too sure of myself. All of this is provisional. If I state it forcefully it's just because I want to get it down with the feel and excitement of it for me. I often look back and decide that I was wrong, but I think it's valuable to paraphrase, paraphrase, paraphrase. To me this is a digging beneath the surface of phrases that can become routine and lose their force. I speculate that 'deconstruction' has lost its force. I have enjoyed some of Derrida, but I now see that the 'spiritual' motive of deconstruction was covered over by an excessive cleverness. And the cliche about pomo is that it is some cheap relativism. Since epistemology is so often assumed to be the essence of philosophy, this is to be expected.
Deconstruction must (from the outside) somehow be about doubt as opposed to revelation. Nevermind that such a shallow understanding of philosophy's potential is what deconstruction (destruction) destroys as a sort of heart-shrinking bondage.
[quote= link]
In "Heidegger and Hegel: Exploring the Hidden Hegelianism of Being and Time" Schwartz Wentzer picks up similar themes in arguing that Heidegger's hermeneutics of facticity is motivated by a revision of Hegelianism. He suggests that there is a parallel between the development of spirit in Hegel and Heidegger's view that philosophy arises in factical life as an understanding or interpretation of that factical life. In both cases, the insight is drawn from the claim that self-consciousness occurs in and through the development of history. Self-understanding not only occurs in history but takes a historical form. Thus, interpretation is subject to historical determination, and Dasein's self-understanding is always historically articulated. Schwartz Wentzer argues that Heidegger modifies Hegel by exchanging the Hegelian logic of a teleological dialectics for the method of hermeneutic destruction and the principle of subjectivity for the concept of facticity (144).
[/quote]
http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/hermeneutical-heidegger/
Was Heidegger a belated left Hegelian?
Last point is how this passage from Nietzsche resonates with Heidegger:
I think the only way to make guilt clear is to relate it to the care structure which is supposed to be an ontological characterization of how dasein exists. (Notice I used the word 'how' there. I think I read somewhere that 'the how' was eventually supplanted by the concept of 'care' in B&T. I think I must have read that in one of the many forewords in to the excerpts in his Basic Writings text I was skimming through recently.) So in B&T care is basically being ahead of itself (existence), being already in the world (facticity) as being alongside entities which we encounter within the world (falling). Guilt relates to facticity. He suggests that the only way that this purely formalised (i.e., formally indicated) existential concept is related to our everyday understanding of the same signifier is that both concepts share a 'lack' or a 'not' or a 'nullity'. Existential guilt has an existential nullity whereas everyday guilt has a present at hand or ready to hand nullity. He defines Guilty! or existential guilt in B&T as being the basis of a nullity. This existential nullity is specifically that we cannot get behind our thrownness. Or that we cannot choose the mattering into which we are thrown.
In B&T he says "How is dasein this thrown basis? Only in that it projects itself upon possibilities into which it has been thrown. The Self, which as such has to lay the basis for itself, can never get that basis into its power; and yet , as existing, it must take over being-a-basis..."
Hmm... similarly to how the different senses of guilt have differing ontological modes of nullity maybe the same is true of death. Perhaps biological perishing has a present at hand nullity? Demise, perhaps a case could be made that demise is intelligible only on the basis of a ready to hand nullity, maybe? Which leaves the existential nullity, death? As existential it is the future that will never arrive. Does that make sense? I mean maybe if we understand death purely existentially, then maybe death is the originary future, so to speak.
I think Heidegger's concept of wholeness too cannot be present at hand, nor ready to hand, but can only be an existential wholeness. As a contrast, an existentially unwhole existence would be loosing yourself in the cares and concerns of everydayness and the chatter of the they. Instead of loosing yourself, wholenesss would be winning yourself. As you quoted above:
I still feel confused about the how. Can you please repeat what you understand the how to mean?