Oddly Enough
November 8th, 2007, search relatedRelated posts :: Oddly Enough :: Oddly Enough - Existence of something, existence of an electron :: Oddly Enough :: Oddly Enough
Jan Straathof wrote:
> Joe, you wrote:
>
> [snip]
>
>>in english, physical objects like stones, chairs, horses and even the
>>human body are said to exist; and, thus, the interesting question for
>>philosophy is: is there a being within the existing human body? Am I a
>>being or just an existing (thing)? and so on.
>As i tried to say in my previous post, for Heidegger it is crusial to
>understand a human being not just as a physical object among other
>physical objects. Human being is in the first place Dasein, i.e. an
>entity that is characteristically open to the world (cf. Erschossenheit).
>Dasein, being-here, means being-in (In-sein), means being-in-the-world
>(In-der-Welt-sein). To think/name ‘men’ is to think/name ‘world’.
>There is no human being without t/here being, in an equiprimordial
>sense, a world in which s/he lives. Human being and world belong
>together in an ontologically inseparable sense. …
>
>Only a human
>being ‘has’ a world in the sense that for humans, beings like stones,
>chairs, horses etc. as-such, are public, clear, in the open (oeffentlich);
>and this is not the case for animals. But what about the human body ?
>Heidegger himself has written little about this subject, but in the
>phenomenological tradition he and Husserl inaugurated others have
>picked up this question. The first who must be mentioned is the french
>philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty with his brillant study _The
>Phenomenology of Perception_ (1945), highly recommended. Also
>the italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben is interesting in this regard,
>see his _Homo sacer_ (1995); _L’Aperto: L’uomo e l’animale_ (2002).
>Anyway what can be learnt from Heidegger’s SuZ is that the human
>body is not something differentiated or separated from the human mind.
>Heidegger is very wary of dualisms like body-mind, subject-object,
>matter-spirit, mankind-reality, thinking-doing; ratio-emotion, etc. etc.
>that are so common and prevalent in positivists thought. For him a
>human being as Dasein (i.e who i am) is a unity, a whole of actions,
>experiences, feelings, thoughts, abilities and interests, memories and
>expectations, hopes and fears, worries and delights etc. ect. From this
>holistic conception of human being our body must therefore never be
>understood (or studied and treated) as something like a stone, a chair
>or a horse. .
is the human individual more than just a human body? this is a question
that has been asked for millenia; and, although there are only three
possible answers (’Yes’, ‘No’ and ‘I don’t know’), the question remains.
it sounds like you think that Heidegger has answered this age-old
question in the negative. How did he do that?
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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