Heidegger

I was going wait to be told I got it all wrong, but it hasn’t
happened yet, so here goes.

— Kevin Winters wrote:
> > > Here are my questions: first, is the “pre-essential essence” Heidegger’s
> > > view or is he attributing it to those who see the nonessence as
> >”inferior”?
> > > I believe it is the former, but I can’t quite make it out (the English
> >is
> > > too ambiguous: does the “is here” refer to the traditional view or his
> > > reformulation of it?).
> >
> >”is here” refers to nonessence as the mystery.
>
> So the “pre-essential essence” is his view of nonessence as the mystery, as
> the concealed?

“Pre-essential essence” is, using your term traditional and the
translation of wesen in the Contributions:
pre-the-traditional-conceptualization-of-essence sway.

Nonessence are the ineffable qualities of the concealed.

> If this is the case (correct me if I am wrong), then
> Heidegger is trying to say that the nonessence of truth (concealment) is
> pre-essential, not non-essential (as the traditional view sees it).

Dasein understands something both through what is revealed and what
is concealed. What is concealed is more that the traditional-non-
essential.

> Concealment is that which is _aletheia_’s own, that which Da-sein
> “conserves” in every unconcealing. Is this right?

I don’t understand _aletheia_’s own concealment; aletheia as a
thing that has properties. Dasein conserves unconcealment, in
that the unconcealed is part of Dasein’s making sense of
something.

> > > Second, how is this notion of nonessence a
> > > “deformation of that already inferior essence”?
> >
> >If inferior essence is “general (_koinon_, _genos_)”,
> >then nonessence would be not-general (_psuedos_) or
> >falsity.
>
> I’m a little fuzzy on this answer: is Heidegger’s view of the pre-essential
> essence supposed to be understood in terms of the not-general or is your
> statement directed towards the traditional view? If the former, how are we
> to understand this “not-general”?

Bad phrasing on my part. Let me try to make it simpler without losing
Heidegger’s point entirely.

In traditional essentializing, a horse has hair, and it does not have scales.
Besides crude non-traditional-essentials like not-having-scales, Dasein
understands a horse by other, ineffable, concealments. The horse sways
(or beyng essences it) to Dasein’s understanding in other ways besides
the traditional-essential properties it has and doesn’t have.

> > > Is his view of the
> > > nonessence a “deformation” of the traditional view or does he mean
> >something
> > > else that does not come out in the translation?
> >
> >His view of the nonessence is what is concealed. A concealment that
> >is not merely the reverse of the truth.
> >
> >”To our way of thinking, this means that the counter-essence to truth
> >is not exhausted or fulfilled in falsity.” Parmenides, p. 67
>
> So, the understanding of the nonessence of truth as pre-essential essence is
> a deformation of the traditional view (the one that says the non-essence of
> truth is ‘inferior’ to truth proper)?

The traditional view is a given. Adjectives like inferior or deformed
are misleading. The traditional view provide a conceptual basis for
truth. It has its uses, but it is incomplete. Dasein makes sense of
the world through more than traditional-essences and concepts.

> This passage has been bothering me for the last month and I just can’t seem
> to grasp it, so forgive me if I’m not getting it right away.

You, and anyone else that reads Heidegger without already understanding
it. There’s Heidegger’s prose, the translators add another layer of
difficulty, ontology has been sitting in a rarely visited corner
of normal philosophy for centuries, so its assumed but not thought
through, nor is it a part of everyday discourse, all of which make this
stuff inherently difficult to read and understand.

And then, when you do understand his way of thinking (except for the
bits you still don’t) and you can unpack what the prose means, someone
will come along and tell you you’ve got it all wrong.

Posted on Wednesday, May 31st, 2006 at 8:30 pm
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