Heidegger

First Person vs Third Person

>If, however, you start with the statement, ‘I am’, and draw the
>implication, ‘I am not a member of the empty set’, then you are already
>on the way to losing the question concerning ‘am’. Why? Because then
>you have shifted the horizon of questioning to set theory, which can
>never shed light on the difference between ‘am’ and ‘is’. Set theory
>operates with elements in the third person, e.g. ‘5 is an element of
>the set of natural numbers.’ To say, e.g. ‘I am an element of the set
>of human beings living on Earth today’, has already lost the
>specificity of ‘am’ as a mode of being. From our debate it is obvious
>that you indeed want to lose that specificity, for your leading
>question is ‘What am I?’.

I would agree that there is a difference between first and third person
statements. that’s why analyzing ‘it is’ is not really a good way to
discuss ‘I am’.

however, the third person is not entirely useless; and, it can provide
some focus; for example, sometimes, ‘what am I?’ is the first person way
of asking, ‘what is the structure of the human individual?’ or ‘is there
a being within the human individual?’.

any analysis that made the answer vary by, say, race or religion would
be unacceptable, would it not?

so, when one asks the question of being (’is there being?’ or ‘am I a
being?’) where ‘being’ is defined as the name of reality type 3
(ontological or non-physical), one does need to move past any attachment
to the idiosyncratic personality quirks a given person might have.

Joe

–
Philosophy is, after all, done ultimately in the first person for the
first person. — H-N Castaneda

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 http://what-am-i.net
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Posted on Wednesday, January 9th, 2008 at 7:30 am
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