Surely, you’re capable of recognizing the absurdity in such a critique: Nietzsche’s will to power wasn’t a positive thesis, it was just a negative critique of what Schopenhauer didn’t include in his conception of the cosmic will. Semantics.
Kindly refer to the opening post of this thread. My question here concerns whether or not we can legitimately discourse about reality as it is independently of Dasein, that being for whom reality is made intelligible, made to unconceal itself–or, contrarily, to remain hidden and incomprehensible. For Heidegger, the world is the world for Dasein. Reality neither is or is not independently of Dasein. But I hesitate to conclude that we can on this basis claim the complete mind-dependence of all of existence. Again, this is all for Heidegger; these are not my views. I’m humble enough to concede a lack of total understanding when it comes to the distinction between realism and idealism that surfaces around two hundred pages into the first division of B&T. But this isn’t to say that Heidegger doesn’t at all have any positive claims. Doubtless, he does. I merely wanted to discuss possible streams of interpretation that surround those claims. And here I should thank you for completely derailing my endeavour.
Did Heidegger pose the question of the meaning of being, or did he endeavour to make intelligible the posing of that question? I’ll save you the embarrassment of having to re-read the preface: it’s the latter. Being and Time is an attempt to articulate what conceals itself in the structures of existent Dasein such that a formulation of the question of the meaning of being is made possible. You’re right, he considered his own task incomplete, and moved on to different, more poetic considerations in his later works. But that doesn’t render legitimate the claim that all four hundred pages of Being and Time amount to nothing more than a sustained nay-saying.
It’s not clear why you want to force a realist reading out of Heidegger. And for you to even want to try, you should need some impetus from Heidegger’s text itself (none given)—unless, you’re just developing your own views. (But given your comments to some of the people here, Heidegger interpretation seems to be the project). You mentioned that the phenomena/noumena distinction was unpalatable to you. I’m not sure what that means, or what your criticism of it is.
Anyways, my own view is that trying to locate Heidegger along the realist vs idealist divide is misguided from the start. It’s a traditional metaphysical distinction that doesn’t well apply to Heidegger, because Dasein doesn’t correspond to the traditional conception of ‘subject’, and Heidegger’s use of ‘world’ doesn’t correspond to the traditional concept of ‘object’. (This’ll be a problem if you’re attached to historical labels).
Anyways, bear with me since it’s been years and years since I’ve read Heidegger—and I regret reading him in the first place. So anyways, Dasein doesn’t correspond to the traditional ‘subject’ in the sense that Dasein is supposed to be a reconception of human existence as not standing apart—not distinguished from—something Dasein essentially is not (i.e., the world). I’m not sure if this makes any sense, but we’re not talking about two separate substances when talking about Dasein and the world. This is not your grandmother’s “substance ontology”. Heidegger is on his horse about what sort of being Dasein is, and that is more fundamental than the question of how Dasein represents to itself a ‘world’. (The sense in which Heidegger’s ontology is more fundamental than the traditional substance ontology would require going into Heidegger’s ontological categories of readiness-to-hand and present-at-hand… and, frankly, I really don’t want to. (It’s Heidegger, not you).
Also, Heidegger isn’t thinking of ‘world’ in the Kantian way as a cause of phenomena, or something like that—or the world as a container of objects. It’s more like a contexture of relations. Ontical is the (unnecessary) word, I think. It’s more like how you would speak of ‘world’ in the sense of its use in the phrase: “the world of baseball” …a constellation of practices, concerns, equipment, constantly changing.
So, is Heidegger a realist, or an idealist? —That strikes me as a misguided question from the start. Perhaps it’s a question worth asking about Heidegger, if we’re being something a tad backwardly anachronistic, but as for Heidegger interpretation I’m not sure it’s worth the effort.
Nietzsche propose a “philosophy for living”, not an ontology. Learn the difference.
All that is saying, is the typical liberal stance of “we can’t know”. It is NOT professing what IS true, but rather merely that you can’t know and thus are wrong. Of course it is a bit silly to proclaim that “the truth is that no one can know the truth”, but that doesn’t stop people from saying it and it didn’t stop Heidegger from concluding with it.
On the contrary, I am being Heidegger right now. I am revealing, through deconstruction, just as Heidegger had done, that you haven’t a complete thesis in your questioning. You ask of his ontology but clearly can’t identify that there was one.
Haha… “He didn’t ask what being is. He asked what the question means.”
As I said. He never answered the question. And apparently didn’t even understand the question and tried to make sense of it.
He had no ontology to discuss. He had 200 pages of criticisms of others, which is why it is hard to read. I agree with his points, but he didn’t go anywhere with it such as to wined up with a substantial truth other than that other philosophers were over looking issues.
It seems that you interpret the term “fundamental ontology” as “objective ontology”. As in a study of what is, regardless of Dasein, or even regardless of perspective. Nietzsche already understood that this question is meaningless. It’s not a question we can sensibly ask. Heideggers project for a fundamental ontology was not finished, but it further laid the ground for the realization that perspective is the basic required property of all ontic categories, all phenomena. So what is perspective?
Kant makes the assumption that, if there is an observed and defined phenomenon, there is a noumenon to which this phenomenon pertains. But both phenomenon and noumenon are “things”. The distinction is actually meaningless. Heidegger realizes this and simply goes to the depth of phenomena, meaning at once the depths of his own Dasein, and does a lot of work there at the threshold of reason, of language, breaking definitively with the notion of phenomenality as thing-ness, on which the noumenon/phenomenon dichotomy depends, and recognizing rather a specific type of emerging, which as far as he can see is characteristic of all being. So his fundamental “object of knowledge” is a behavior, a way of coming-into-being, which he then explores in various phenomenological terrains in his later work. His major work in my eyes is to clarify that positivistic definition must be actually positive, in the most active sense. It can not be neutral, “noumenal”, or suggest objectivity.
The point to make here is that being for Dasein is still in the same ontological category as “being for being”, that the latter is not related to objectivity in any sense. Being for Dasein is the question of philosophy, which ultimately means, a question of telos. This telos has to be created, and this is what continental philosophy aspires to, as opposed to analyn tical philosophy which assumes always a neutrality (passivity, non-positivity) of truth. So the correlation between the two types of being is to be found in the role that Dasein takes on, meaning, the measure in which it is able to answer the question of being, which means the measure in which it is able to integrate itself cognitively with that (ontological ground) from (also, as) which it emerges.
He said of course that man had not yet begun to think, and what he meant is that man had not begun to cognate in the terms of / in harmony with his emerging. He was certainly right in this but did not arrive at a systemic terminology for this emergent cognating, so we can not “consolidate” Heideggers work but must move forward and add to it in order to make it clearer.
Fixed Cross: thank you, yours is the type of post I was looking for.
Yes, this seems correct. My fear was that by taking such a conception as a starting point, the consequent philosophy makes it difficult to speak intelligibly of being as it exists apart from Dasein. However, I think this is cleared up with your invocation of the Heideggerian emergence, or rather: unconcealment, disclosing.
Ah, yes. Good. This is what I was looking for. That emergence must be understood as an emergence-for seems to be what Heidegger indicates here: “If Dasein does not exist then innerworldly beings, too, can neither be discovered, nor can they lie in concealment. Then it can neither be said that beings are, nor that they are not” (B&T 204). Without Dasein, being cannot emerge, because being can not even lie in a hiddenness or concealment from which it might subsequently emerge. Hiddenness from what? This question means nothing without the being for whom being is a question. I think the important point to note here is that being is being-for-Dasein without relegating Dasein to a conscious intentional direction toward being. If this were the case, then Heidegger indeed would seem to confine himself to an idealism. But, he stipulates quite clearly that this is not the case; emphasis his: "Consciousness of reality is itself a way of being-in-the-world" (203). It is a way, not the way. Being is therefore not correlated to thought or idea, but rather to concern or comportment, to the being for whom being can be a question. Or, as Mo_ has written: “[…] Dasein doesn’t correspond to the traditional conception of ‘subject’ […]” (And, by the way, I do appreciate your comment, Mo.)
Indeed, for, given Heidegger’s account, being-for-being as objective, as standing-apart from being-for-Dasein, is simply nonsense. In terms of the analytic of Dasein, objectively present beings are indeed real, apart from a particular subject’s ideas of them. However, one runs amiss in extending this realism to an objective-presence independently of Dasein. Present to what? Heidegger might ask. Consequently, it seems as if the very terms necessary in formulating the question of the objective existence of the external world misguide us from the beginning. Again, his own words: “The ‘scandal of philosophy’ [Kant referred to a lack of proof for the existence of the world outside of the subject as one of philosophy’s great scandals] does not consist in the fact that this proof is still lacking up to now, but in the fact that such proofs are expected and attempted again and again. Such expectations, intentions, and demands grow out of an ontologically insufficient way of positing that from which, independently and ‘outside’ of which, a ‘world’ is to be proven as objectively present” (197). Thus, the proof of an external world either assumes what it attempts to prove–Dasein’s being-in-the-world–or it starts from the wrong place–the isolated subject, over and against the world that it represents to itself. Indeed, if we are to take seriously the Heideggerian paradigm, we must leave the binary of realism/idealism behind. And this is, I suspect, precisely the point of Mo’s comment. It is well taken.
And this is all, in my eyes, a positive ontology. Not an objective one, whatever that might mean, but a perspectival one. Not individually perspectival, but perspectival in the most fundamental sense of the term–that there is perspective, that there is a “that from which”, as Heidegger says, a being for whom being is capable of concealing or disclosing. That there is, in short, a there (as in there-being, dasein). James, you and I remain locked in complete and total disagreement.
I’m sure that will remain the statues quo. Although I have to ponder how A can agree with B who agrees with C and yet A disagrees with C.
It appears to me that Heidegger is pointing out that due to people’s existence as beings, they cannot analyze what it is to be a being directly from their own perspective. This seems parallel to the relativity concern in physics that was extrapolated to include all reality in that it is proposed that all space and time is relative to the observer and thus no observation can be said to be objective. In the case of the relativity theory, it was further extended to say that because of the principle of relativity, there actually is no objective/absolute reality at all. And that notion is what has led to the very many philosophies concerning the non-existence of absolutes, certainties, truth, God, fundamental cause, or cause and effect.
Now I don’t think that Heidegger went to that extreme, but does that sum up the direction you believe he was taking?
The short answer is no. The longer answer: you might try actually reading Heidegger. And you can find the properly long answer reiterated time and again throughout the posts you’ve decided to ignore. But you’re not going to get a three-line synopsis of Heidegger, no matter how precise your comprehension.
Like I couldn’t have guessed that was going to be your response…
Perhaps if you try actually thinking more calmly about what you read, you could answer such questions.
…and perhaps even understand your favorite philosophers…
…just for a change.
I began this thread in hopes of clarifying the status of realism, and of idealism, within the framework of Heidegger’s ontology. I believe this has been settled by way of a few substantive comments here–unless, of course, there are still a few shy Heideggerians interested in participation. You, James, showed up seemingly only to denigrate what you mistakenly take to be Heidegger’s lack of an ontology. Unasked for, you offered your own idiosyncratic metaphysic as an arbitrary standard against which to disqualify the views of a so-called 18th century novice, perfectly ignorant to the fact that Being and Time was written in 1927. Further, you endeavour to lecture me on what I should recognize in Heidegger’s philosophy, on the way I ought to read philosophy in general, and on the way I ought to interpret one of my “favourite” philosophers. Heidegger is not among my favourites. And you have yet to contribute anything at all to this thread. Now, please, leave. I’ll be sure to reciprocate the favour by withholding my irrelevant condescensions from those threads of whose topics I know nothing.
Yes, it’s interesting how Heidegger roots the conception of “the nature of being” in the way it is being disclosed. This is of course a thoroughly philosophical approach, as opposed to a scientific one. Science can disclose a certain type of event and relation to us, but it can never disclose what such events and relations can mean to us, nor reveal the consequence of knowing them.
There have not been a lot of serious thinkers since the beginning of the technological age, most aspiring philosophers have contented themselves with observing the machine-like nature of the world, and speculating on mans relation toward/within the machine. Heidegger is unique and very valuable in that he refuses the speak the language of subjection, but perceives consistently from a human, more or less classical perspective. One consequence of this steadfast stance facing a fundamentally changing world is that the domain of language is being broken open.
Concern or comportement, yes - defined by the specific nature of the being. I have called this “self-valuing” - the standard by which the subject values, be it Dasein or not, and sustains itself. This primordial activity is the “home” to which all modes of activity bring back their harvest, and the web of activities emerging from crossed interests, “the World” can only be a home, and not a war/perishing ground, if a connection is established from the subjects most essential nature (self-valuing) and the dynamics of The World, - and to this end Heidegger describes the world and its most general attributes, to this end he selects his terms. But this work is so much in its beginning stadium that we can not afford to think that the work has been done, that Heidegger presents a complete philosophy - I see him primarily as the thinker who makes it possible to think forward, away from the objectivistic paradigm of which Nietzsche was both destroyer and last prophet.
In a nutshell: we can not speak of “objective” or “outside” reality, except by influencing it in a certain direction. That is: influencing our perception of it, by enacting certain manipulations and “making sense” of what we perceive. This is just how it is, except in the case that we accept leveling, destruction, erasing of positive difference in favor of certainty, objectivity. Heideggers solution of defining human being as “dwelling, building and thinking”, where these three point to the same activity (Dasein), indicates where “truth” can be “found” - in properly enacting the activity of being itself. One can not “stand aside and observe” without observing and realizing destruction. One needs to engage in order to know, understand. But how to engage? This in itself is a “science”, but not an objectivist one. This science, or perhaps rather technè, which I would translate as “skillset”, demands a balance of already-knowing and trusting that one can not possibly pre-establish the outcome before it emerges.
How this balance can be theorized, how a general “virtuous” comportement (for with axiomatic positivism, subjectivism and therewith ethics are unavoidable) can be established through philosophical modeling is a question Heidegger did not arrive at fully addressing, as he did not even arrive at the end of his own trajectory - a definition of the emergent subject in terms of what is important to that subject. Hence the creation of ‘value ontology’ - a way to define being without enclosing it in form, in objectivity.
Indeed, but this “that from which” can be further disclosed than Heidegger did. At least, I believe that value ontology does not compromise Heideggers deeply continental philosophical ethics while adding an analytical component to it. The integrity is preserved by defining only in such terms that do not make particular claims, besides to a selection from the objective-theoretically possible of that which would in fact logically exist, given the absence of “cold”, objective being, being that “just is”. When we throw out that idea, that being “just is”, we can narrow down ontology to something that resonates/compares with our own being as we experience it, which would quite obviously (or so it seems to me) be a logical necessity, even though many scientists tend to ridicule the idea that man could be a standard for the objects of his own knowledge.
