The Heideggerian Dasein: The Human Being as a Context for Meaning
Alejandro Betancourt
And then when I come along and note that a state “of being lost and removed from particular worlds” historically and culturally and experientially must also be taken into account, I am accused by some of not really grasping Dasein the philosophical/intellectual contraption in Being and Time.
Okay, but my main interest in that revolves precisely around how the conclusions that Heidegger comes to regarding Dasein in his philosophy tome are in fact applicable to different people out in particular worlds. Dasein and the Nazis. Dasein and the Jews. Authenticity and inauthenticity given interactions between them back in Heidegger’s time.
What, to go there is to misconstrue the true nature of philosophical discourse?
In our own way, existentially, and given vast and varied circumstantial contexts, we all choose to please others and/or are concerned with how others perceive us. But: given the manner in which I construe the meaning of dasein here – ilovephilosophy.com/viewtop … 1&t=176529 – we might choose to please others or be perceived by them in many dissimilar and conflicting ways. How then given Heidegger’s Dasein is that any different?
Please. Language revolves around the biological evolution of life on Earth into the human species. We are genetically predisposed to both create complex languages and to utilize them in communicating any number of things. But: Are there limitations here? What language is invented to communicate things that are true for all of us? And what language instead becomes considerably more problematic such that a “failure to communicate” is often more the rule than the exception?
The Heideggerian Dasein: The Human Being as a Context for Meaning
Alejandro Betancourt
Conclusion…
Is it even possible to encompass human existence in an intellectual/philosophical contraption further removed existentially from the lives that we actually live as individuals? It sounds more like something you would encounter from an astrologer. In other words, it can mean practically anything to anyone.
Whose language? Being created in what set of circumstances? Understood in what manner down through the ages and in communities that might differ from each other in many crucial ways.
Instead, it would appear the task of philosophers should be to acknowledge this. And then to ask themselves, "okay, given all of the many, many diverse ways in which human social, political and economic interactions have unfolded, how do we go about, using the tools of philosophy, of encompassing what might be understood as the least irrational behaviors? What might be deemed the least dysfunctional prescriptions and proscriptions in regard to “rules of behavior” in the community?
And, if objective morality is not possible in a No God world, should not the “best of all possible” worlds revolve around moderation, negotiation and compromise?
Instead, ironically enough, for those like Heidegger – a Nazi! – it all basically stays up in what I construe to be the least controversial and most didactic – pedantic? – clouds:
On the contrary, the manner in which I encompass dasein in my signature threads above seems far more relevant in discussing particular situations that actual flesh and blood human beings might find themselves in. And that is because, again, if the above really does express Heidegger’s assumptions regarding an authentic human existence, it would seem to rationalize virtually anything any particular individual might “think up” as encompassing “Who I Really Am”.
As though our thoughts and feelings have little or nothing to do with the world we are thrown into at birth historically and culturally. Or with our indoctrination as children. Or with the Benjamin Button Syndrome reflected in acquiring and accumulating value judgments.
Dasein and World: Heidegger’s Reconceiving of the Transcendental After Husserl
Niall Keane
Yes, Heidegger is thought of by many to be an existentialist. Which it to say that the philosophical focus is more on “existence is prior to essence” than “essence is prior to existence.”
And here “essence” can revolve around different things. For most it revolves around God and religion. But it can also revolve around a political ideology or a deontological philosophical assessment or a particular portrayal of Nature. In other words, we are expected to behave in accordance with one or another Holy Book. Or one or another Manifesto. Or one or another attachment to so-called “biological imperatives”.
And, in my view, one can “recover their worldliness” only out in a particular world. But: given all of the widely conflicting assessments there have been over the centuries regarding the nature of the world itself, wouldn’t one presume that the number one task facing philosophers is in determining whether, using the tools at their disposal, there either is or is not a “one size fits all” worldliness?
No, instead, the focus returns to what, from my frame of mind, is little more than intellectual gibberish…
How does this not read as something one might expect from Alan Sokal?
Is anyone here willing to defend it as a collection of important points regarding Dasein? Well, if so, please note how they are applicable to your own interactions with others. And, in particular, interactions out in the phenomenal world in which conflicts might erupt regarding the consequences of actual behaviors.
Or how do you suppose Heidegger himself might have connected the dots between an assessment of this sort and, say, the Nazis?
Dasein and World: Heidegger’s Reconceiving of the Transcendental After Husserl
Niall Keane
[b]Naturalism is “the philosophical belief that everything arises from natural properties and causes, and supernatural or spiritual explanations are excluded or discounted.”
“Idealism is the metaphysical view that associates reality to ideas in the mind rather than to material objects. It lays emphasis on the mental or spiritual components of experience, and renounces the notion of material existence.”
“Phenomenology is a philosophy of experience. For phenomenology the ultimate source of all meaning and value is the lived experience of human beings. All philosophical systems, scientific theories, or aesthetic judgments have the status of abstractions from the ebb and flow of the lived world.”[/b]
Okay, in regard to human interactions that come into conflict because “I” believe this and “you” believe that and “someone else” believes something other than what either one of us do, how are those definitions applicable?
Jack believes that in regard to someone convicted of premeditated first-degree murder, capital punishment is always right. Jane believes that it is always wrong. Mike believes that in some cases it is wrong but in other cases it is right.
So, in regard to the rationality and the morality of capital punishment, how would you go about “recover[ing] human being and world from pernicious forms of naturalism and absolute idealism”?
Heidegger’s Dasein and my dasein given that particular context.
Again, regarding those aspects of the observable and measurable world that revolve around something being either true or false in the either/or world, objective reality abounds. For example in Texas, capital punishment has been the law of the land since 1976. In Maryland [my home state] it has been illegal since 2013.
In other words, in regard to the phenomenon we call a “state execution”, there are no “supernatural or spiritual” elements that I am aware of. No state justifies execution by way of one or another quote from a Bible or religious scripture. Though some may well connect their own convictions to their religious beliefs.
Then you tell me how this…
…might be applicable to the capital punishment debate.
Or does the whole point here revolve around eschewing “supernatural and spiritual” elements in exploring human interactions belonging to a particular world. The one in Texas and the one in Maryland?
As for “intuitive self-givenness” my own assessment of phenomenology pertaining to human interactions still revolves “for all practical purposes” around my own rendition of dasein here: ilovephilosophy.com/viewtop … 1&t=176529
Dasein and World: Heidegger’s Reconceiving of the Transcendental After Husserl
Niall Keane
They just can’t help themselves? Ever and always assessments of this sort have to be couched in the vernacular of the “serious philosopher”.
Really, in regard to your own interactions with others in which “things” are construed from conflicting points of view, how do you describe them as “cultural, spiritual or natural” objects that “stand over” your own subjective agency.
Whose “worldly-character” might prevail?
And how do you imagine Heidegger himself relating this particular world of words to the rise of fascism in Germany at the time?
Or is noting things of this sort when philosophy ceases to be serious?
Of course, existentially, how one construes the meaning of the “unworldly character of transcendental consciousness in its constituting transcendent reality as unities of meaning for consciousness”, might make all the difference in the world, right?
After all, it assumes that there is a “transcendent consciousness” intertwined “somehow” in a “transcendent reality” that philosophically can be connected to one or another assessment of phenomenological interactions between mere mortals…socially, politically and/or economically?
Anyone here care to go there given a particular context?
HEIDEGGER AND ETHICS:
FROM DASEIN AS BEING-IN-THE-WORLD TO DASEIN AS ETHICAL
Eric Panicco
How could it not be? Other than in “being there” one is entirely alone. Suppose you are stranded on island and everything revolves around subsisting…surviving. Now, for some, they may believe in God. A relationship between I and Thou is sustained that involves behaving in such a way as to please God. But if one is alone and has no belief in God, ethics is irrelevant. It’s all about you and nature. And nature has no moral code.
So, let’s call this castaway Mark.
One day, another man – Michael – washes up on shore and joins Mark. And that changes everything. Suddenly what Mark does might be questioned by the newcomer Michael. For any number of reasons he might object to what Mark chooses to do. And Mark to what Michael chooses to do.
In other words, when Dasein involves two or more adults together “being there” necessitates “rules of behavior”. Ethics some will call this.
And here that might be predicated on might makes right. One or the other castaway is simply stronger, more powerful than the other and gets to dictate the relationship. Or they find out that they both share the same moral code. Right makes might unnecessary. Or they agree to negotiate and compromise in regard to their interactions.
The crucial point is that for each of us “being there” involves a particular set of circumstances. And, in certain respects, those circumstances will go a long way in determining which behaviors are rewarded and which ones are punished.
I merely suggest that, in a No God world, “philosophical ethics” is almost always only applicable “theoretically” up in the intellectual clouds.
Of course, that’s my point regarding the manner in which Heidegger’s Dasein bears little resemblance to my own dasein. My dasein revolves almost entirely around individuals “being there” in a set of circumstances that involve “conflicting goods”. The part where I root the “self” existentially out in particular worlds that for each of us can be very, very different. And that in using the tools of philosophy then, “failures to communicate” are the rule as often as the exception. Depending on which collection of moral and political prejudices one accumulates. And how at odds they are with another’s.
Here, all I can do is to tap those on the shoulders who have read Being and Time and think they understand Heidegger’s “philosophical” assessment of Dasein and ask them if they are willing to “bring it down to Earth” and in particular contexts compare and contrast it with my own rendition of dasein here: ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=176529
HEIDEGGER AND ETHICS:
FROM DASEIN AS BEING-IN-THE-WORLD TO DASEIN AS ETHICAL
Eric Panicco
And thus Martin Heidegger is often construed to be an existentialist. Which is to say that, in being “engaged in the world”, it is not a world connected inherently or necessarily to one or another God, or one or another ontological/teleological/deontological font into which individuals are expected to subsume, among other things, meaning and purpose.
In other words, “existence is prior to essence” and each of us make our own way from the cradle to the grave out in particular worlds that, while shaping and molding us, will do so only up to a point. Beyond that we are on our own in framing and fashioning our Self in what for some existentialists is an essentially meaningless – and even absurd – world.
Whatever, for all practical purposes, that means?
Dasein becomes the embodiment of the “ontic” self. A self that has no access to such things as religious fonts or Platonic forms. Just the manner in which each of us is indoctrinated as children and then come to interact with others in a considerably more existential space/time continuum.
As for one “ha[ving] prephenomenological experience and acquaintance” and “becoming invisible if one interprets it in a way which is ontologically inappropriate…”. you tell me how that is applicable to your own life.
Again and again: what particular subject in relationship to what particular object? And the relationship is certainly presupposed in that each of us as individual subjects come into contact over and over again with actual objects out in a particular world. Like, for example, the subject Martin Heidegger came into contact with an object – a book – entitled Mein Kampf. And came into contact with an objective entity called the National Socialist German Workers’ Party…and became a member in 1933.
As for how any of this is “baleful” or the extent to which “its ontological necessity and especially its ontological meaning are to be left in the dark”, you tell me.
Nope, not my dasein. These “technical” arguments may well be over my head, but from my frame of mind everything revolves around the extent to which any particular individual subject reacts to any particular object like book or a political party given the existential prejudices that he or she acquires that revolve around these objects actually being around given the life that he or she lives.
And with my dasein, as soon as a subject chooses to interact with others, rules of behaviors invariably become necessary because people come to want and need different things in different contexts.
This is the sort of thing that always fascinates me…philosophically and otherwise.
I was just reading Maureen Dowd’s column in New York Times. It pertained to the possible demise of the TCM channel. But what grabbed my attention was this…
“…my father had a ticket for the Titanic when he was a teenager. His mother cried so much, he sold it to a young woman. She survived, but her hair turned prematurely white. My Irish dad immigrated to America the following year.”
The Benjamin Button Syndrome at its most dramatic? Had Mom not cried so much he would have been on that fateful voyage. And had he been, it was likely that he would have died. And had he died, Ms. Dowd would never have been born.
I wouldn’t be reading her column and you wouldn’t be reading these words.
That’s the way human interactions unfold. Some things we are aware of, some things we control. But other things we aren’t and don’t. The smallest of things can precipitate the largest of consequences.
HEIDEGGER AND ETHICS:
FROM DASEIN AS BEING-IN-THE-WORLD TO DASEIN AS ETHICAL
Eric Panicco
Sound familiar? The part where science revolves largely around the either/or world. Something broached theoretically either is or is not wholly in sync objectively with the laws of matter. After all, it’s not often that physicists and chemists and biologists and geologists or even meteorologists are tasked with resolving moral quandaries.
Though, sure, to the extent that ethics is discussed and debated up in the theoretical clouds things might be “resolved” in the sense that agreements might be reached regarding definitions and deductions. Same with Dasein as an intellectual contraption in Being and Time. Dasein theoretically meets morality theoretically?
But take them both out into the world of conflicting goods…into conflagrations that rage day in and day out “in the news”?
Our “pre-theoretical intuition”?
Okay, given a moral conflict of note, how would you encompass your own pre-theoretical intuition?
Here, again, I would still need someone to explain to me how human intuition itself is not in turn rooted existentially in dasein.
Intuition:
[b]“a thing that one knows or considers likely from instinctive feeling rather than conscious reasoning.”
“the ability to understand something immediately, without the need for conscious reasoning.”
“Intuition, in philosophy, the power of obtaining knowledge that cannot be acquired either by inference or observation, by reason or experience.”[/b]
Okay, but just as those all up and down the moral and political spectrums, think and feel what they do regarding their moral convictions, don’t they intuit what “deep down” they “just know” is right or wrong all up and down them as well?
How are our intuitions not shaped and molded as well by our indoctrination as children and by the social, political and economic parameters of the particular world we are a part of historically and culturally?
As for this…
…what on Earth does it mean to you in regard to your own value judgments? How do you relate Dasein as construed in Being and Time to your own understanding of what it means to be ethical? The part where you make distinctions between thinking and feeling and intuiting when choosing behaviors.
This^ is what you get, when someone tries to use you as a proxy, in their argument against another… them, being desperate, going out of their way to engage with the proxy when they have rarely engaged with the proxy in the past/over the years.
[size=85][…clearing-out my 100s of draft messages, and replying to or deleting, them][/size]
HEIDEGGER AND ETHICS:
FROM DASEIN AS BEING-IN-THE-WORLD TO DASEIN AS ETHICAL
Eric Panicco
Take any of these things. Now, given how you think you understand Heidegger’s own understanding of them in Being and Time, take that assessment out into the world of human interactions in which conflicts pop up regarding moral value judgments.
Clearly, it is not a question of if there is a connection between Dasein and ethics, but how could there not be one? In other words, pertaining to any of us as individuals who choose to interact with others socially, politically and economically. “Mineness” and “being with” and “anxiety” and “authenticity” are likely to be most prevalent precisely when ethics becomes a factor in human interactions.
And then for those interested, we can explore the manner in which my own understanding of dasein overlaps and differs from Heidegger’s assessment of Dasein.
HEIDEGGER AND ETHICS:
FROM DASEIN AS BEING-IN-THE-WORLD TO DASEIN AS ETHICAL
Eric Panicco
To the extent that any particular one of us chooses to interact with others on a day-to-day basis is the extent to which “rules of behavior” come into play. Call this ethics, call this something else. And into this space we come up with our own existential assessment of what is rational and moral to do and what is not rational and moral to do. Heidegger himself was no exception, right? And, in fact, the space he occupied back then is bursting at the seams with controversy.
Okay, but Kant connected the philosophical dots to God. He had to in order that ethics could be construed as categorical and imperative. One embodied care and solicitude towards others because ultimately one was judged by God and not by the Führer.
This Aristotle:
“Aristotle strongly believed and justified the institution of slavery. He opined slaves as the possession of the family or, in other words, was considered the property of the master or the family. He stated that slavery is natural and beneficial to both the masters as well as the slaves.”
Readiness-to-hand, indeed. Heidegger had his own existential rendition of that. Only some argue that it revolved more around extermination than enslavement.
Again, any discussion of ethical “outcomes”, of ethical “consequences” can only be grappled with realistically given particular historical contexts. The actual outcomes and consequences for who? And the part where one person’s happiness is sustained only at the expense of others.
HEIDEGGER AND ETHICS:
FROM DASEIN AS BEING-IN-THE-WORLD TO DASEIN AS ETHICAL
Eric Panicco
One possible translation: In broaching the phenoneological relationship between Dasein and ethics, don’t expect anything in the way of actual behavioral presriptions and proscription. This is more in the way of laying a philosophical foundation for the discussion of Dasein and ethics.
In other words, after reading the entirely of Being and Time, don’t imagine that you will be able to assess whether or not, say, the Nazis’ “final solution” was something that perhaps should not have been pursued. Instead, the task here is to take the “self” down out of the Platonic or theological or objectivist or a priori clouds and anchor it more substantively to the actual phenomenological reality of human interactions.
Then way, way, way up into the philosophical clouds…
Again, all I can do is to request of those who think they do understand the point being made here, to bring that point down out of the theoretical clouds and note how it is applicable to them phenomenologically in regard to particular contexts they have been embedded in existentially such that ethical conflicts prompted them to champion one set of behaviors rather than others.
