Heidegger

Joseph Polanik wrote:

> >So you are asking why Heidegger prioritizes being-alongside over
> >being-inside.
>
> not exactly. Heidegger, like anyone else, can choose where to put his
> attention; but, choosing one viewpoint to the exclusion of the other
> doesn’t seem like a well-balanced approach to me.

I never said he excluded the other. I said he *prioritizes* one over the
other. In section 13, Heidegger argues that we do NOT first encounter
beings as individual physical substances next to one another inside the
physical universe. Rather, we first encounter them as useful, within a
total context of use, and only after ripping that context of use away do
we end up with an “individual” being “in itself,” at which point “use”
is seen as merely an addition, not as integral to its very being.

> the ‘world’ that is spoken of when one says being-in (in the sense of
> inside) is not the same ‘world’ that is spoken of when one says being-in
> (in the sense of being-alongside).
>
> using first-person pronouns subscripted by reality type for greater
> precision, one might say ‘I-1, this human body, am an existent and I
> exist within a world of existing entities of various kinds including
> other humans’.
>
> in this statement, which I hope captures the sense of ‘insideness’,
> ‘world’ is for me a world of reality type 1. this corresponds rather
> well to usage 1 in the enumeration Heidegger uses in section 14 of BaT:
> “the totality of those entitites which can be present-at-hand within the
> world”.
>
> it seems to me that, when Heidegger speaks of being-alongside as opposed
> to being-inside the world, he is speaking of usage 3 from his list:
> “that ‘wherein’ a factical Dasein as such can be said to ‘live’”.
>
> would you agree?

I haven’t looked up the line, but that sounds correct.

> >There are several avenues we can take with this. I don’t prefer
> >Heidegger’s etymological avenue, not because it’s wrong, but because I
> >think there is a much more convincing avenue - one which motivated
> >Heidegger to break from Husserl. That avenue is that if we prioritize
> >being-inside (so that I am a physical being next to other beings, all
> >inside the universe), the history of philosophy showed that this leads
> >to the complete subjectivization and denial of the world. If I am one
> >thing next to other things, the first priority is to figure out how I
> >come to be aware of those other beings. That epistemological question
> >is what caused Husserl to require that philosophy *begins* by denying
> >the metaphysical existence of the world, reducing it to merely the
> >world of my experience (something similar to what Descartes does at the
> >beginning of the second meditation).
>
> your analysis of the history of philosophy is questionable for two
> reasons. first, epistemological concerns only require a suspension of
> judgement as to the origin of experience rather than an outright denial
> that there is a metaphenomenal world(s) that is the origin of
> experience.

It’s an eternal suspension of judgment, not a temporary one. Descartes
attempted to prove God’s existence in order to reground his belief in
the world - a move that just about everyone today rejects. Similarly,
Husserl never recovers the existence of the world after he suspends it.
So this method leads to endless skepticism (total suspension of belief)
about the being of the world. No philosophical claim after that can be
about beings.

> secondly, from what I can tell from readings in the contemporary
> philosophy of consciousness, defining humans as no more than human
> bodies (irregardless of whether we call those bodies ‘existings’ or
> ‘beings’) more often leads to an excessive objectification than to an
> excessive subjectification.

That’s only because they usually don’t question as deeply as
philosophers like Descartes and Husserl do.

> it seems to me that any absence of epistemological doubts associated
> with choosing ‘being-alongside’ as a ’starting point’ is due to a
> failure to ask the right questions rather than to any natural immunity
> this starting point gives.
>
> unless Heidegger has somehow prohibited others from expressing his
> (Heidegger’s) philosophy in the first person, anyone may translate
> “Dasein is an entity which in each case I myself am” into something like
> “I am myself *this* … whatever this is”. anyone who makes such an
> observation may ask the obvious follow-up question ‘what am I?’.
>
> the question is not about the relation (being-in vs being-alongside) to
> the world. it is about the internal structure of I, this which I am.

Beginning in section 25, Heidegger explicitly argues that what “I” am is
not originally “me,” but “they.” In more colloquial terms, human
consciousness is most fundamentally contextual, and only subordinately
individual - only after ripping away “other” voices do we then end up
with an isolated self.

Posted on Friday, February 29th, 2008 at 12:55 pm
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