Heidegger passage

Gregory September 11, 2020 at 06:32 1925 views 5 comments

"..what if the being that is thematic for the existential analytic conceals the being which belongs to it and does so in its very way of being? ..Self-interpretation belongs to the being of Being... Whether explicitly or not, whether appropriately or not, existence is somehow understood.". (1)

Anything we say about being has the "via" prepared by by the kind of being that Being is.

Is Beingness itself like a sound, or more like brick? Can we really say what percent of being objects and sound have?

Comments (5)

Kevin September 11, 2020 at 12:25 #451307 0 likes

Quoting Gregory

Can we really say what percent of being objects and sound have?

I think this question is formulated somewhat strangely - to exhibit this strangeness, consider:

[Quote="Gregory;d9137"]Can we really say what percent of [that which determines beings in their being beings] have?[/quote]

It seems analogous to saying something like:

"Can we say what percentage of a brick's brickness (which itself would be not be a brick) can a brick have?"

or:

"Can we say how much of the essence of sound, as that which distinguishes a sound as a sound, does each sound have?"

Gregory September 11, 2020 at 16:59 #451348 0 likes

Reply to Kevin

Good observations. Heidegger considers being to be a single thing: existence. From his Scholastic training he learned that different objects have being more or less. The "more or less" is the issue. I was wondering if a beautiful painting has more existence than an ugly one, and whether songs as they are being sung have any being

Gregory September 11, 2020 at 18:37 #451358 0 likes

Paragraph 313 in Being and Time says: "Has being-in-the-world a higher instance of its potentuality-of-being than its own death?" ( it's even italicized in the book)

So he asks if there is more "being" in death or in life. Therefore there can be more or less being

Gregory September 11, 2020 at 18:40 #451359 0 likes

And what would the fullness of being look like?

Dfpolis September 24, 2020 at 21:26 #455611 0 likes

In the Sophist, Plato suggests that anything that can act or be acted upon has being. I do not think that "can be acted upon" increases the extension of "being" because if we try to act on something, and it does not react, then however much we are exerting ourselves, we are not acting on it at all -- and if we are not acting upon it, it is not being acted upon.

So, we may say that whatever can act in any way has being. If so, then to be able to do more is to have more being. A being that can act only physically has less being than one that can act physically and intentionally. So, we start to ascend a hierarchy of being terminating in omnipotent being, God.