Comments on: The Dasein/Non-Dasein Problem

By: Adriel Trott

Adriel Trott — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 16:51:29 +0000

Great post, anotherpanacea. I find it interesting that the accusations against Heidegger have been that he bought into Nazism but there is very little attempt to understand why. I think it is important to understand what he misperceived in order to think the question of whether his insights and philosophy is necessary fascist. I think some elements might be — authenticity for example — but I worry very much that the baby is being thrown out with the bathwater and you do a good job arguing here for why the baby is something we don't want to lose.

By: Joshua

Joshua — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 11:37:54 +0000

enowning: The movement from ready-to-hand to present-to-hand seems to be an account of how counterfactuals, like skepticism, emerge. It's only when I can't find my keys that I start thinking of the world as an assemblage of objects, and start to wonder at my body as an assemblage like it.

Steve: It's true that all ways of speaking will reveal one part of being while obscuring another. However, Heidegger worries that any attempt to make sense of our mental states in terms of the natural sciences will not only fail, but will be disastrous both ethically ("standing reserve") and from the perspective of fundamental ontology. ("putting nature on the rack," or "where the world becomes picture, the system… comes to dominance")

By: Steven Maloney

Steven Maloney — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 18:36:59 +0000

Forgive my limited understanding of the jargon with some of these philosophical distinctions, but isn't Heidegger a Hermenuetical Realist who believes that there are multiple lexicons that can reveal things about reality? I don't see Heidegger's stance on "hadrons" being "let them be" so much as to say that we can only describe them in relation to our encounters with them. For Heidegger, science can say scientifically true things about hadrons. What science can never do is say that "physicalism is true." Just because hadrons can be shown to exist doesn't serve as evidence that all things are "essentially physical" any more than Aquinas is grounded in saying that all things are essentially reflections of the Kingdom of Heaven. Rejecting that physical essentialism is a provable conjecture is not the same thing as arguing that no true things can be scientifically said about the physical world.

By: enowning

enowning — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 14:57:55 +0000

"counterfactuals" doesn't appear in B&T.

By: Joshua

Joshua — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 12:51:37 +0000

I was referring to the "Letter on Humanism."

Heidegger solves the conceptual/phenomenological source of counterfactuals in the first Division of Being and Time.

By: enowning

enowning — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 12:48:31 +0000

"I think it’s fair to say that Heidegger lays the metaphysical groundwork for existentialism and for anti-humanism by prioritizing existence over essence,"

It's Sartre who said "existence precedes essence", in an lecture published as "Existentialism is a Humanism." In it, he incorrectly attributed it to Heidegger, who responded with his "Letter on Humanism", where he indicated that Sartre was a Cartesian stuck in metaphysics: "The reversal of a metaphysical principle remains a metaphysical principle"; i.e. Sartre didn't it. To prove Heidegger right, Sartre embraced Marxism for the rest of his career. The "Letter on Humanism" set the stage for what were called the post-structuralists (Foucault, Derrida, etc) to make a decisive break with Sartre's generation.

"The problem that Heidegger solves is the conceptual source of counterfactuals."

Where does Heidegger do this?