Heidegger

allen scult wrote:

> Philosophy is not life. It dwells in the realm of the existential,
> figuring possibilities which form the worldly environment in which
> Dasein makes its ontic choices. The purpose of these ontological
> considerations aside from for-itself -understanding, is to
> distinguish those possibilities through which Dasein may realize its
> ownmost potential for being-itself, what we might call authenticity.
> In this sense, we might say that the formal indications which
> ontology discloses can serve the purpose of pointing the “I” in the
> direction of authenticity if not a kind of moral correctness.
>
> Case in point: In #27 of Division I(page 126. I’m sorry I only have
> the English here with me):
>
> In one’s concern with what one has taken hold of, whether with, for,
> or against, the Others, there is constant care as to the way one
> differs from them, whether that difference is merely one that is to
> be evened out, whether one’s own Dasein has lagged behind the Others
> and wants to catch up in relation to them, or whether one’s Dasein
> already has some priority over them and sets out to keep them
> suppressed. The care about this distance between them is disturbing
> to Being-with-one-another, though this disturbance is one that is
> hidden from it.”
>
> Well. . .It seems that this deficient form of care, keeping one
> preoccupied with differences that really have no ontological
> significance, is made possible by Dasein’s basic mode of Being-with.
> But a “correct” ontological understanding of Dasein as Being-with
> will show this ontic form of Being-with in its deficiency. And so
> Heidegger’s philosophy here has the force to thinkingly divert one
> from perpetrating evil upon those with whom one has only imagined
> differences.

Is the ontological understanding of differences as deficiencies in
Being-with the same as showing them as “only imagined”? Isn’t the latter
itself an ontic reduction - i.e., the “real” vs. the merely “imagined”?
If so, then that can’t be what an genuinely ontological understanding of
Dasein as Being-with would reveal.

Rather, wouldn’t the result of such understanding be those differences
*ontologically understood*, rather than the relegation of such
differences to the “only imagined”? For example, an ontological
understanding of (say) physics wouldn’t show *physical* being to be
merely imagined, but rather as a deficient form of being-in. Physics
would be as valid as ever - ontologically understood.

Posted on Monday, March 10th, 2008 at 2:55 am
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