Heidegger

Saicho at aol.com wrote:
>In reading over your exchanges with Joe, I was compelled to get out my >old writings of Heidegger and find quick answers to Joes question >regarding proof that the great H was or was not a transcendentalist.
>To begin with, it is not required that a transcendentalist come right >out and admit to believing in something transcendental – some ghostly >entity, like god or Zeus or the devil.
I agree. where a person is concealing the true structure of his or her belief system, one would have to infer it from statements made.
>All that is required is to examine a persons line of reasoning in >dealing with definitions, words and concepts. Underlined and commented >on in the margin with a bold: WHAT SILLYNESS!, I read the following:
>”Insofar as Being constitutes what is asked about, and insofar as Being >means the Being of beings, beings themselves turn out to be what is >interrogated in the question of Being. Beings are, so to speak, >interrogated with regard to their Being. But if they are to exhibit the >characteristics of their Being without falsification they must for >their part have become accessible in advance as they are in >themselves.”
>If this means anything at all, it is an example of a circular ramble >trying to fix meaning on a mysterious abstraction that, in Heideggers >mind, has transcendental reality. *Being* is capitalized for the same >reason that god usually is. For a person who spends a great deal of >time in showing that *The concept of Being is undefinable,* he labors >through many pages in trying to define it.
I don’t agree that obscure prose and/or faulty logic is necessarily a sign of covert transcendental thinking. a transcendentalist position may be clearly stated and clearly defended whereas a physicalist position may be incompletely or incoherently defended.
what I mean by transcendentalist is a claim that there is at least one non-physical meta-phenomenal reality — one that is independent of the experience an I has of it. an immaterial mind would count as a transcendental entity; but, neither a bat in the inkblot nor an afterimage would.
in that regard, consider this note by the translators (Macquarrie & Robinson: “The participle ’siend’ must be distinguished from the infinitive ’sein’ which we shall usually translate either by the infinitive ‘to be’ or by the gerund ‘being’. It must also be distinguished from the important substantive ‘Sein’ (always capitalized), which we shall translate as ‘Being’ (capitalized).” [BaT p. 1., footnote 1]
now, if by ’substantive’ in this passage is meant a cartesian-style ’substance’; then, Heidegger would be a transcendentalist only if the human (this daSein) included a substance other than res extensa (matergy in Jud’s jargon).
here’s the question for the various list members of the lists to which this post is posted: does Heidegger assume that there is, within the human, a cartesian style substance other than res extensa?
Joe
— Philosophy is, after all, done ultimately in the first person for the first person. — H-N Castaneda
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Posted on Sunday, October 12th, 2008 at 6:03 am
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