Heidegger

WHAT AM I?
Better than that. Reading a book without knowing its context of author’s
achievements and Weltanschauung often, if not always leads to put erroneous
constructions on some assertions. Best example is “I think, therefore I am” of
Descartes. Unprepared reading gives on the one hand the impression of “thinking”
having some mysterious ontological power of creating “being”. On the other
hand, a slight linguistic competence tells us that it’s just bad English (or
Latin for that matter), ill-formulated and thus meaningless. “(to) be” is a
copula, an operator assigning (predicate) attributes to (subject) entity. “I am
singing” is a statement. “I am” is a truncated cripple screaming for “what
am I? mincemeat?”. The auxiliary character of “be” and its lack of intrinsic
meaning is stressed by its absence in semitic languages: “house is great” is
in Hebrew “beit gadol” - “house great”. As this copula happens to have the
syntactic form of verb, one has hastily and illegitimately ascribed sense to its
verbal inflections such as “to be” or “being”. Taken on the face of it
“Cogito ergo Sum”, “To be or not to be” and “Being” of Sein und Zeit and L’Etre et
le Neant are empty chains of characters void of any meaning. That’s for
unprepared reader. However, that who knows authors’ context will see in them
unfortunate rhetoric shortcuts implying for Hamlet “to live”, for Heidegger and
Sartre “Existent”. The more complex issue of Cogito: It has no ontological
existential implications, but is confined to epistemological problem of
certainty, asserting that while the contents of my thoughts are subject to the
permanent doubt, my awareness of thinking is certain. I would never grasp it by
myself without being guided by Tatarkiewicz.

Posted on Sunday, June 22nd, 2008 at 6:00 am
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