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We think we're in the present, but we're not
Dasein is hard to get at, as we learn in §5 of Being and Time.
True, Dasein is ontically not only what is near or even nearest – we ourselves are it, each of us. Nevertheless, or precisely for this reason, it is ontologically what is farthest removed. / Das Dasein ist zwar ontisch nicht nur nahe oder gar das nächste -- wir sind es sogar je selbst. Trotzdem oder gerade deshalb ist es ontologisch das Fernste.
What accounts for this inability to see what is nearest?
A well-known popular illustration of this inability to see what is "right there in front of us" is found in the play "Our Town." Characters who have died look on at themselves and others while they were alive and marvel at their inability to understand and live life. One of the characters, Emily, is getting ready for a wedding but can't find her blue ribbon. The mother points it out and says, "If it were a snake it would bite you," meaning "the ribbon is right there how can you not see it?" The characters of the play who are dead see the snake line as a good summary commentary-metaphor on the disconnect that afflicts characters who are alive and life itself. In any event, we are all familiar with the phenomenon Heidegger refers to: not seeing something that is very close to us which we in fact are. For example, white people being unable to 'see' their whiteness; or Americans overseas who are surprised to learn that foreigners think of them as very loud. But again, why and how does this happen?
Dasein tends to understand its own being in terms of that being to which it is essentially, continually, and most closely related -- the "world." In Dasein itself and therewith in its own understanding of being...the way the world is understood is ontologically reflected back upon the interpretation of Dasein. / Das Dasein hat vielmehr gemäß einer zu ihm gehörigen Seinsart die Tendenz, das eigene Sein aus dem Seienden her zu verstehen, zu dem es sich wesenhaft ständig und zunächst verhält, aus der "Welt." Im Dasein selbst und damit in seinem eigenen Seinsverständnis liegt das, was wir als die ontologische Rückstrahlung des Weltverständnisses auf die Daseinauslegung aufweisen werden.
The self-understanding of Dasein is overly influenced by the current ontological understanding of the world. Descartes, Kant, and a wide variety of human sciences such as psychology, anthropology, and so on are mentioned as obstacles to the understanding of Dasein due to their excessive reliance on "the way the world is understood...ontologically" at their respective historical moments.
To really get at Dasein, we need the second big noun from Heidegger's title, "time."
[W]e must show that time is that from which Dasein tacitly understands and interprets something like being at all. Time must be brought to light and genuinely grasped as the horizon of every understanding and interpretation of being. For this to become clear we need an original explication of time as the horizon of the understanding of being, in terms of temporality as the being of Dasein which understands being. / [S]oll gezeigt werden, daß das, von wo aus Dasein überhaupt so etwas wie Sein unausdrücklich versteht und auslegt, die Zeit ist. Diese muß als der Horizont alles Seinsverständnisses und jeder Seinsauslegung ans Licht gebracht und genuin begriffen werden. Um das einsichtig werden zu lassen, bedarf es einer ursprünglichen Explikation der Zeit als Horizont des Seinsverständnisses aus der Zeitlichkeit als Sein des seinverstehenden Daseins.
It's easy to see that philosophers like Descartes and Kant leave out "time" as an essential element of their construction of human subjectivity. That's because their pursuit of the truth is afflicted with the notion that truth is the kind of thing that is timeless. This view is a hangover, is it not, from the two worlds theory of Plato. Time is part of the corrupting world of the senses for Plato and the Forms are exactly those ideas not having anything to do with time. This is how Heidegger puts it:
"Time" has long served as the ontological -- or rather ontic -- criterion for naïvely distinguishing the different regions of beings. "Temporal" beings (natural processes and historical events) are separated from "atemporal" beings (spatial and numerical relationships). We are accustomed to distinguishing the "timeless" meaning of propositions from the "temporal" course of propositional statements. Further, a "gap" between "temporal" being and "supratemporal" eternal being is found, and the attempt made to bridge the gap. / Das "Zeit" fungiert seit langem als ontologisches oder vielmehr ontisches Kriterium der naiven Unterscheidung der verschiedenen Regionen des Seienden. Man grenzt ein "zeitlich" Seiendes (die Vorgänge der Natur und due Geschehnisse der Geschichte) ab gegen "unzeitlich" Seiendes (die räumlichen und zahlhaften Verhältnisse). Man plegt "zeitlosen" Sinn von Sätzen abzuheben gegen "zeitlichen" Ablauf der Satzaussagen. Ferner findet man eine "Kluft" zwischen dem "zeitlich" Seienden und dem "überzeitlichen" Ewigen und versucht sich an deren Überbrückung.
It seems to me that Heidegger is explicitly rejecting the idea of being that is tied to the above notion of temporality. If I'm right about that, then it won't be true for Heidegger that "spatial and numerical relationships," due to their "timelessness" have more or better being than other beings we might consider. In general, Heidegger is not trying to come up with a 'big' notion of being that is distant from us and can replace, but play the same role as, the notions of being and time familiar from Platonism and Christianity.
By Swifty | April 25, 2007 in Heidegger | Permalink
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>>It's easy to see that philosophers like Descartes and Kant leave out "time" as an essential element of their construction of human subjectivity. That's because their pursuit of the truth is afflicted with the notion that truth is the kind of thing that is timeless.>>
I don't think that's exactly right for Kant. If by "human subjectivity" for Kant you mean the empirical ego, then the latter is an object of appearance in inner sense--in other words, it only IS insofar as it is streamed along in time. On the other hand, Kant's categorial understanding of being is in a sense atemporal, but the categories are otiose until they are schematized--i.e. until they are given a transcendental time-determination.
The answer to the question of SZ--"What is the meaning of being"? ultimately turns out to be time--on the last page of the published text we learn that time is the horizon for the understanding of being, which means it is the "upon-which" (woraufhin) of any understanding projection of being. This is what meaning is for Heidegger in SZ, the horizon for understanding something. But is that is the case, then Dasein as existential temporality is the condition of possibility of their "being" anything like being. This picture will change in some important respects in the 30s, and I think "On the Essence of Truth" is the place to watch it happen in a nutshell--especially when compared to the section on truth (48?) in SZ.
Posted by: CBR | Apr 25, 2007 4:06:59 PM
I agree with what's already been said about the importance of temporality to Kant; after all, his categories of perception are the forerunners of Heidegger's being-in-the-world. Furthermore, there is a distinctly atemporal element to ontological categories like "thrownness" in Heidegger.
If one is going to describe Heidegger as revising the history of temporality in the philosophical tradition, then one has to reckon with Hegel, who was a philosopher of temporality and described logical process through the vocabulary of time, e.g. through the explication of "moments."
Posted by: René Daumal | Apr 25, 2007 6:18:48 PM
Thrownness is temporal, it denotes Dasein's always already being in a world, i.e. its relation to the past. So I'm not sure exactly what you mean, but if you say more perhaps I will...
Posted by: CBR | Apr 25, 2007 8:54:01 PM
René Daumal: But don't you think Hegel is inflicted by the same assumption that drives so much of western metaphysics, namely the primacy of the absolute? It is the absolute, after all, that is realized, articulated, by history's heroes. Hegel's is one more attempt to bring together the absolute and finite being, split asunder with such force and powerful imagery first by Plato. The famous complaint of Novalis: “Everywhere we seek the unconditioned [das Unbedingte], but find only things [Dinge].”) Hegel seeks to bring together the absolute (for him, a kind of deified reason) and the world: the absolute would provide the slaughterhouse of history with a justification and purpose; while specific events in history provide the absolute with concrete articulations needed to inject life's richness into reason's bare form. But the ultimately determining element is spirit, as can be seen by the fact that the exchange between spirit and life/history/experience is an unequal one: spirit does not absolutely need the reflective light provided by history's determinations, but human history definitely needs the absolute to provide it with some kind of justificatory patina. I think of Heidegger as a philosopher who is self-conscious about the western metaphysical tradition "as a whole," as a project that has been characterized by a certain framing of the question that fatally biases the answers that come out at the other end, and that this biasing is true of the whole of western metaphysics, which is why it's no accident that we see the same dynamics and the same kinds of problems reformulated and recast over and over again. No accident that Jesus Christ talks about having contempt for this world and its supposed riches, urging us instead to put our faith in heaven, while Plato comes up with a two world theory where perfection and the ideal are dead and static; while Descartes divides us up into mind and sensation or again Hegel gives us a dialectic between absolute and finite. It's all one: the whole of western metaphysics is this incredibly perverse division of life into two spheres, that everyone then spends the next fucking two thousand years trying to explain how these two things, finite and infinite, a division that we made up, are supposed to interact or maybe get back together again -- and so again no accident that Aristotle divides the world up into "stuff" and "forms" (though not Plato's 'forms'; it is, after all, necessary to say the same points over and over again in different ways) and tries to tease out a relation between them (thus improving, he hoped, on Plato's more radical division) by saying there's something in the "stuff" that aspires to, "tends towards," the forms. Then when the world is destroyed Augustine comes along and reinvents Plato's wheel, reestablishing and reenergizing the radical split between world and heaven by going Jesus one better and setting up both cities here on earth, the better to war with each other, followed by St. Thomas Aquinas's somewhat softer Aristotelian reversal of Augustine's Platonic revival which, allowed to ripen for a number of centuries, produces Luther and the turn once again to a two world theory, just a lot more insane and self-torturing than before; and on and on. The result of this ever-tightening gyre of manichean absolutes -- is a sick, disturbed race of humans that Hegel's "Unhappy Consciousness" doesn't get close to grasping, that Kierkegaard's anxiety falls short of comprehending, and of which Freud's discontent is only the tip of the iceberg of. But I think David Bowie said it best in "The Supermen":
When all the world was very young
And mountain magic heavy hung
The supermen would walk in file
Guardians of a loveless isle
And gloomy browed with superfear their tragic endless
Lives
Could heave nor sigh
In solemn, perverse serenity, wondrous beings chained to life
Strange games they would play then
No death for the perfect men
Life rolls into one for them
So softly a supergod cries
Where all were minds in uni-thought
Powers weird by mystics taught
No pain, no joy, no power too great
Colossal strength to grasp a fate
Where sad-eyed mermen tossed in slumbers
Nightmare dreams no mortal mind could hold
A man would tear his brother's flesh, a chance to die
To turn to mold.
Far out in the red-sky
Far out from the sad eyes
Strange, mad celebration
So softly a supergod cries
Far out in the red-sky
Far out from the sad eyes
Strange, mad celebration
So softly a supergod dies
Posted by: Swifty | Apr 25, 2007 10:38:59 PM
>>>next fucking two thousand years trying to explain how these two things, finite and infinite, a division that we made up, are supposed to interact or maybe get back together again >>>
I think it's a bit much to say the metaphysical split is "made up," as if someone just invented it; certainly HEidegger wouldn't say that. There's already a tendency inherent in language to this sort of thing, which Hegel recognized; language points at particluars while it utters universals, so there is a split between expression and indication, fact and meaning, already inherent in language. As long as we have grammar we'll believe in God, Nietzsche said. And I think that visual perception, long privileged in metaphysical discourse, also exhibits a drift toward the ideal. What we see, as Husserl showed, is not just this or that profile but a full-blown object, with adjustments for light and distance--in other words, an ideal object. Metaphysics isn't simply an accident or an invention, which is why we can't simply refuse it and move on...
Posted by: CBR | Apr 26, 2007 12:07:15 AM
I'm not sure that the second section you quote amounts to saying "The self-understanding of Dasein is overly influenced by the current ontological understanding of the world," which you expand on by pointing to Descartes and Kant.
When Heidegger says "Dasein tends to understand its own being in terms of [...] the 'world,'" I take him to be pointing out that it is primarily through our involvement with things other than ourselves that we develop our sense of ourselves, and this means mostly the world of average, everyday "concernful" interaction with the world as containing items of use, namely, "equipment."
One of the distinctive features of Heidegger's thought, at least in the first chapters of Division One, is just this focus on what he provisionally calls the primacy of our "practical" engagement over our disinterested, "theoretical" stance. I think this is what he is targeting with the term "world" in that quote, and not this or that theory. Does that make sense?
Posted by: Eleatic Ephesian | Apr 26, 2007 1:18:46 PM
Yeah, and "current" ontological understandings of the world are themselves founded on this absorption, so you're right EE, the founding/founded relation goes the other way. That is why ontology takes human being to be Vorhandensein.
Posted by: CBR | Apr 26, 2007 2:30:41 PM
Why do you move into a discussion of Kant and prior philosophies when Heidegger says right then and there that (your) problem/(his) observation involves "world." What does he mean by world? I don't understand why it's needed at this point to revert to philosophical theories when it seems that H is discussing something pre-theoretical, something ontological, ie that is.
Posted by: cynic librarian | Apr 27, 2007 12:59:48 AM
CBR, in terms of your first comment, thrownness is part of Da-sein's relation to its own temporality, but does not itself go into eclipse or through dialectical transformations. As an ontological category, it is remarkably stable, even if it describes a relation across time.
As for your second post, though, in reponse to Swifty, there I totally agree. Different thinkers have tried in various ways to undermine the propensity within language to name eternities, Forms, absolutes. Derrida tried to temporalize his language by placing it under erasure. Nietzsche metaphorized it as the heroic task of untergang. Hegel used his own narratives to dramatize ideas developing, immanently, their own opposites, and being sublated into new manifestations. Even the absolute becomes absolute self-difference, and collapses triumphantly into a plurality of beings.
Posted by: René Daumal | Apr 27, 2007 1:10:18 AM
Eleatic, I think you are on to what H is about here, but the world is not only things but others and my interaction with them. The essential point about "world" here is that we are indeed immersed in whatever it is that gives us meaning--this fact is what we must disenagge ourselves from in some way in order to find our ownmost own.
Posted by: cynic librarian | Apr 27, 2007 1:18:01 AM
Hi CBR, you write: I think it's a bit much to say the metaphysical split is "made up," as if someone just invented it; certainly HEidegger wouldn't say that. There's already a tendency inherent in language to this sort of thing, which Hegel recognized; language points at particluars while it utters universals, so there is a split between expression and indication, fact and meaning, already inherent in language. As long as we have grammar we'll believe in God, Nietzsche said. [end CBR comment]
I'm not so sure the metaphysics isn't more made up and contingent than your comments suggest. I understand Heidegger to be making an argument for the contingency of the western metaphysical tradition in the quotation below. If it isn't contingent, are we fated to experience it? And is this fate universal -- that is, applicable to non-participants in the western metaphysical tradition?
from Stambaugh translation, pp. 18-19, §6:
The preparatory interpretation of the fundamental structures of Dasein with regard to its usual and average way of being -- in which it is also first of all historical -- will make the following clear: Dasein not only has the inclination to be entangled in the world in which it is and to interpret itself in terms of that world by its reflected light; at the same time Dasein is also entangled in a tradition which it more or less explicitly grasps. This tradition deprives Dasein of its own leadership in questioning and choosing. [my italics, Swifty] This is especially true of that understanding (and its possible development) which is rooted in the most proper being of Dasein -- the ontological understanding. The tradition that thereby gains dominance makes what it "transmits" so little accessible that initially and for the most part it covers it over instead.
Die vorbereitende Interpretation der Fundamentalstrukturen des Daseins hinsichtlich seiner nächsten und durchschnittlichen Seinsart, in der es mithin auch zunächst geschichtlich ist, wird aber folgendes offenbar machen: das Dasein hat nicht nur die Geneigtheit, an seine Welt, in der es ist, zu verfallen und reluzent aus ihr her sich auszulegen. Dasein verfällt in eins damit auch seiner mehr oder minder ausdrücklich ergriffenen Tradition. Diese nimmt ihm die eigene Führung, das Fragen und Wählen ab. [my Kursivschrift - Swifty] Das gilt nicht zuletzt von dem Verständnis und seiner Ausbildbarkeit, das im eigensten Sein des Daseins verwurzelt ist, dem ontologischen.
We could also reflect on Nietzsche, Gay Science, Book Three, §110. I'm sure you are familiar with it or with similar comments from elsewhere.
Origin of knowledge. -- Through immense periods of time, the intellect produced nothing but errors; some ofthem turned out tobe useful and species-preserving; those who hit upon or inherited them fought their fight for themselves and their progeny with greater luck. Such erroneous articles of faith, which were passed on my inheritance further and further, and finally almost became part of the basic endowment of the species, are for example: that there are enduring things; that there are identical things; that there are things, kinds of material, bodies; that a thing is what it appears to be; that our will is free; that what is good for me is also good in and for itself. Only very late did the deniers and doubters of such propositions emerge; only very late did truth emerge as the weakest form of knowledge. It seemed that one was unable to live with it; that our organism was geared for the opposite; all its higher functions, the perceptions of sense and generally every kind of sensation, worked with those basic errors that had been incorporated since time immemorial. Further, even in the realm of knowledge those propositions became the norms according to which one determined 'true' and 'untrue' -- down to the most remote areas of pure logic. Thus the strength of knowledge lies not in its degree of truth, but in its age, its embeddedness, its character as a condition of life. [end Nietzsche excerpt]
And the whole of Gay Science 110 is to the point. The point being: western metaphysics is contingent, local, an error baked by time.
Posted by: Swifty | Apr 27, 2007 10:00:40 AM
I probably shouldn't comment, because I'm relatively ignorant of Heidegger, but Nishitani's "Religion and Nothingness" discusses both H. and Nietzsche -- Nishitani was a student of Heidegger. I came to this from a Buddhist perspective, and I think that Nishitani's Buddhism is a powerful perspective from which to view Nietzsche and Heidegger.
On the temporality question, many forms of philosophy (including some Buddhism) assume a closed, decided future -- effectively producing a timeless world, since the future is already decided, though we don't know it. This idea can be grounded on metaphysics, theism, or determinist physics, but I think that it is erroneous and needs to be rejected. Contingency and an open future is a more accurate idea of reality, and it's a future which we help create. (This is a pragmatist idea coming from me, but Rorty believes, or once did believe, that there is a road from pragmatism to Heidegger.)
Posted by: John Emerson | Apr 27, 2007 11:52:17 AM
Up to a point, Nietzsche is better at overcoming Manichean opposites than Heidegger, not only because of the fluidity of his system of becoming, but because nothing metaphysical opposes the will-to-power: it can only ever be disguised. In Heidegger, by contrast, the "most proper being of Da-sein," the ontological being, is confronted in a recognizably Manichean fashion by the ontic. To say that we are always in the ontic, as Heidegger does, doesn't make his system less oppositional; in fact, it's very similar to our entrenchment in sin, in Augustine or Luther.
Even for Nietzsche, the critique of Manichean opposites transcends itself. It is an error, certainly, but if one needs errors to live, it is inevitable that for some people Manichean opposites will be their version of the sustaining, life-giving error.
It is always delightful to return to The Gay Science; moreso, perhaps, than Bowie, whose poem (and understanding of the übermensch generally) seems more thrilling than clear.
Posted by: René Daumal | Apr 27, 2007 9:21:43 PM
>>>CBR, in terms of your first comment, thrownness is part of Da-sein's relation to its own temporality, but does not itself go into eclipse or through dialectical transformations. As an ontological category, it is remarkably stable, even if it describes a relation across time.>>>
OK, I see where you're going now. So in a sense, SZ is transcendental philosophy, except that existentials describe ways of being, or types of ontological movement, as opposed to categories which are unchanging discursive forms; also, existentials are arrived at in a hermeneutic meditation that mediates between the a priori and the factical, as opposed to transcendental reflection on the a priori proper.
Of course, all this depends on Dasein being that which one arrives at when one reflects on the original experiences behind metaphysics at any time, rather than a historically-conditioned thing. This picture is already complicated by the abovementioned hermeneutics of facticity, but it is true that if there is a sense of Dasein itself changing historically or dialectically, it isn't really thematized in SZ, although Heidegger came to see it that way later. But I think something like the historical contingency of Dasein is implied in SZ...although for the earlier Heidegger, this can be accounted for by a sense of necessary errancy that doesn't necessarily imply any historical sending of being.
Sorry if some of that is murky or ill-formulated, I'm in the process of thinking about this one...
Posted by: CBR | Apr 28, 2007 12:32:59 AM
Swifty,
This thread is getting unwieldy, which is a good thing, of course...
I read the quote from Heidegger to suggest a couple of things, none of which are equivalent (in my reading) to making metaphysics an invention.
1. That our absorption in the world amounts to a natural propensity to reify Dasein and develop a metaphysics of Vorhandensein.
2. That we must always win anew an original relation to the matters at stake in philosophical discourse.
Note that the quote (as per 2) mentions the way the tradition (qua "tradition") hands things down to us--not how each philosopher deals with his own time. Granted, for Heidegger in SZ the question of the meaning of being has been forgotten. But as we get to later Heidegger it is more and more stressed that this is a NECESSARY forgetting, and different possibilities obtain at different times. But I'll grant you that for the Heidegger of SZ, it sometimes sounds as though the tradition has simply screwed up; even then, it is never arbitrary or the result of stupidity, but an inevitable tendency due to our absorption in the world.
Heidegger's essay on the "Anaximander Fragment" is an interesting later meditation on how metaphysics gets cooking.
A separate question you raise is whether metaphysics is contingent. I don't know if I personally have an answer to this one. But for later Heidegger, it's neither necessary or contingent; those are themselves metapysical categories, derived from Aristotle. The epochs of metaphysics occur without why. For SZ Heidegger, though, the order that things have happened, and the historical opportunity for fundamental ontology and the Seinsfrage, are not thematized, and probably do seem contingent from the perspective of SZ. This relates to my exchange with Rene Daumal; I think this is something that really got thought out later.
For Nietzsche, for the most part, I would say it plays out thusly: Invented, no--Contingent, yes. But for FN it's a matter of drives or desires masquerading as a dispassionate search for truth. This doesn't mean there is a mastermind behind the scenes pulling levers, though. FN remarks elsewhere that we see lightning, and language fools us into thinking that there is something besides the flashing that flashes (i.e. something metaphysical, behind appearances); the flashing IS the lightning.
Posted by: CBR | Apr 28, 2007 12:57:16 AM
Second the recommendation for Nishitani (but wasn't he just the translator for Nishida?), especially wrt. 'the gaze in the expanded field.'
Thanks so much for these fine posts, John.
Posted by: Matt | Apr 28, 2007 12:28:40 PM
Nominalist,
You're thinking of "Dasani." Easy mistake...
Posted by: realist | Apr 28, 2007 10:03:26 PM
Can we please start deleting this guy?
Posted by: CBR | Apr 29, 2007 6:52:12 PM
Keiji Nishitana was probably the second greatest influence on the development of the Kyoto School, after Nishida of course. If you're at all interested in them, the Stanford article provides a great introduction.
Posted by: Collin | May 2, 2007 5:57:18 PM
Nishitani*
Posted by: Collin | May 2, 2007 5:58:46 PM
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