It sounds beautiful. But where can we “remove all that exists” so that only time remains? And who will be able to observe it?
Obviously, this is not a physical experiment. Besides, Heidegger directly says that Being cannot be observed directly.
I wasn’t seeing the river or water from epistemological sense.
Everyone knows what river is, knows what water flowing in the river is. They don’t need to pour the water to fire to see the steam rising to know it was water.
For me the river was the world, and water flowing in the river was time. Folks cannot step into the same water in the river, was just saying of Heraclitus as a metaphor for something.
In reality, folks can step into the river as many times as they like as long as they are alive, and there is a river to step into. But that wasn’t what the metaphor was about.
Not sure if Heidegger said that much about death in his Being and Time. All he said was Being is existence heading for certain death, and Being as Dasein (Being There) is aware of inevitable death of itself.
I didn’t think Heidegger has given out detailed inquiries and explanation on the fate of being and what will happen to the dead body of Being after its death.
Maybe he did? I am not sure, I have not finished reading Being & Time quite a while ago when I was reading it. Could you confirm on that point?
But then, what is the value of such a conversation about existence (including the idea presented) if it boils down to reasoning about something that might exist within our understanding of it? Or, more bluntly, is it worth trusting a study of reality that is essentially a thought experiment?
Show me where I claimed Heidegger said all of this. However, if we’re moving from a constructive discussion to a “who can out-argue” mode, then I’m not interested in continuing this dialogue.
Philosophy is not a science, but a way of thinking. Therefore, the term “proof” is not applicable here. Because the very necessity of proof — or, conversely, its non-necessity — is itself proposed by philosophy.
If you read my post to you again clearly, I wasn’t saying your were claiming anything. I was just counter claiming, and giving my own points on your epistemological claim on the water and fire, which sounded not quite making sense.
And I was asking you to confirm if Heidegger said much about dead body of Being after death of Being like you did.
Two features of beings stand out prominently for me.
One is that beings endure and change. They only change by enduring. So various “states” of the being are synthesized. The being is a temporal synthesis of its states.
The other is that beings are “between us” in the sense of shared by us. The being shows itself differently to different subjects. Yet we intend the same being nevertheless.
So the being, as between us, is an interpersonal sythesis of its “aspects.”
If I believe/trust that the same being is also there for you, then I tacitly understand that the being is more than what it shows to me. The being I discuss with others has a “dark side” relative to me.
I agree. That should not be forgotten. And I take this receding yet “grounding” contexture to be one important reading of “being.” This is one approach to the ontological difference, where being is “world,” which is not a thing “in” that world.
Yes, the pair “hidden/manifest” is also how I’d describe his topic.
I’m tempted to understand time as disclosure, as the hidden becoming manifest and the manifest hidden. So the manifest is also being. But Heidegger had good reason to stress the hidden, because thinkers tended to imagine that being could be squeezed into a total manifestation in the present, which basically denies the reality of time ---- pretends that time is secondary to being, that being can be purified of time.
It seems to me that Heidegger, in general, belonged to people with a mystical type of thinking, among whom I can also include myself. What is funny is that this manifests itself only in the study of philosophy and art; in everything else, I am completely non-religious and not superstitious. I think Heidegger is interesting precisely for people with this kind of inclination.
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Yes indeed, and this is even the “deeper meaning” of the pronoun “I” you might say.
Right. So one of my focuses is on how signs signify. Humans largely share the world through signs. We take it for granted, but signs offer us a rich “radiance” that is metaphorically a visiting ghost. We are “there with” the dead. As we write, we are “there with” those unborn.
Feuerbach might say that we are not just us individuals in our participation in language. We each live our own time, and yet we live with a strong sense of sharing some of this time with others.
The most mundane way is just sharing furniture and traffic lights and hamburgers with others. As in we take others to also see them and smell them and so on, the same objects from different points of view.
So our “rivers” are “sewn together” ( partially) by these objects, with a special emphasis on those objects called “signs.” In signs we can “store insight.” But this “insight” is not “in” the sign but rather in the relation of the sign to the world.
“It is only out of the temporality of discourse, i.e., of Dasein as such, that the ‘emergence’ of ‘meaning’ can be clarified and the possibility of any concept formation be made ontologically intelligible” (SZ 349).
So dasein or existence is the temporality or river-time of discourse. I think we can understand this to say something like: existence is the ongoing revelation of reality that is something like the “progressive” radiance of signs as we come to understand them.
Existence is the reading of itself as “text.” Philosophy is not something in life but a metaphor for life.
More dramatically, being is ontology itself. Being is its own questioning. This dynamic self-revealing questioning is disclosure, the hidden becoming manifest, which is to say time.
The “character” of the manifested is there as having-already-been-there. Phenomenology “foregrounds” what manifests as having been lurking in the background all along.
But this is my own situated offering of signs. It is not “representational” but indexical — a pointing cemented for its meaning in this fugitive context.
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In Heidegger, Being knows itself is Being because it is thinking Being, not because “non-being is not”.
Being doesn’t need comparison for its knowledge on itself or death. Being knows because Being means also thinking, perceiving, anticipating and feeling via manifesting and revealing of the world onto Being.
I agree. I think I especially like very early Heidegger ( lectures in the 20s) because he comes off as critical as a logical positivist. He was famous back then for his “icy conceptuality.” With this cold, methodical conceptuality, he tried to “get a grip on” life in its pretheoretical nakedness. So he gives us a sort of theory that tries to get around theory, increasing our sense of the “object itself” which is not an object.
Kisiel’s The Genesis of Being and Time is how I got into this early stuff, and Kisiel has flavor and force as a writer himself. For example, he’s talking here about Heidegger in 1919.
In fact, it was in this semester which inaugurated his phenomenological decade that he first discovered his root metaphor of the ‘way’ to describe his very kinetic sense of philosophy. Philosophy is not theory, outstrips any theory or conceptual system it may develop, because it can only approximate and never really comprehend the immediate experience it wishes to articulate. That which is nearest to us in experience is farthest removed from our comprehension. Philosophy in its ‘poverty of thought’ is ultimately reduced to maintaining its proximating orientation toward the pre-theoretical origin which is its subject matter. Philosophy is accordingly an orienting comportment, a praxis of striving, and a protreptic encouraging such a striving. Its expressions are only ‘formal indications’ which smooth the way toward intensifying the sense of the immediate in which we find ourselves. It is always precursory in its pronouncements,a forerunner of insights, a harbinger and hermeneutic herald of life’s possibilities of understanding and articulation. In short, philosophy is more a form of life on the edge of expression than a science. That phenomenology is more a preconceptual, provisory comportment than a conceptual science, that the formally indicating ‘concepts’ are first intended to serve life rather than science, becomes transparent only after the turn…
…
Philosophy is ‘philosophizing’, being ‘on the way to language,’ ways —not works.
Here’s another, same author:
In just these few lines we learn from Heidegger, in yet another way, that there is a depth to every “thing” that cannot be exhausted by the word, even the poet’s word. Every being is always more than what we can say or think about it; every being is always more—it exceeds or overflows—sense or meaning.
…
A being is present to us in the word, but it is always more than the word. The “unthinkable” remains. There always remains the “mystery” of each and every “thing.” Similarly, there always remains the inexhaustible depth of Being (be-ing)— the singular ontological temporal process or “way” (the Being-way) whereby and wherein all “things” come to be. For this very reason, Being has so many names in Heidegger’s thinking, among them: physis, aletheia, the primordial Logos, kosmos, hen, Ereignis, Lichtung. And it is our task to name Being—the inexhaustible “it” that “gives” (Es gibt)—yet again in our own way and in our own words.
How else can we say this ?
Beings have a temporal depth. In this sense ( among others?) being is time.
If you remember, my starting question was about the entry point for talking about being. And I haven’t found it for myself.
Heidegger’s unfolding being… I honestly admit – I like Heidegger. But this poetic metaphor about unfolding? I understand it to mean that knowing being is possible not through non-being (which would be the simplest path), but through comparing the stages of this being’s unfolding. This is a truly interesting starting point. Here, to understand being, we can compare what it was like at a previous moment in time with what it is like now.
But note that when speaking about being, I always return to the question of what I can know, and when speaking about what I can know, I return to being.
Therefore, I would be extremely curious to find this entry point into the question of being… Perhaps it’s on the riverbank?
As I said Being already knows it is Being by thinking, perceiving and interacting with the world, and existing (being) in the world.
Self knowledge of Being is already presupposed in the existence of Being in Heidegger.
This is one way to frame an entry:
In summary, Being itself is the unconcealing of beings (ἀλήθεια); the emerging, arising, appearing, shining forth of beings (φύσις); the laying out and fore-gathering of beings (the primordial Λόγος) – but also the “appropriating” (Ereignis) of beings and the “lighting” and “clearing” (Lichtung) of beings. Yet to be more precise, characterizing Being itself as the appearing or manifesting of beings does not in the first place refer to the sheer, abiding “appearance” or “presence” of beings (which came to be spoken of in the metaphysical tradition as εἶδος, μορφή, οὐσία, ἐνέργεια, actualitas, essentia), but rather to anwesen selbst, presencing itself, or to “Bewegtheit” (Heidegger’s translation of Aristotle’s κίνησις), namely, the “movedness” of all beings into and out of presence, which Heidegger meditated on at length, especially in his commentary on Aristotle’s Physics, B I.42 Being itself: the unifying one and only, temporal-spatial emerging or appropriating of beings into presence – but also the giving, granting, freeing, letting of beings – as long as we understand by “letting” this “enabling” (Ermöchlichung) and “empowering” (Ermächtigung) movement into (and out of) presence.
Also:
In just these few lines we learn from Heidegger, in yet another way, that there is a depth to every “thing” that cannot be exhausted by the word, even the poet’s word. Every being is always more than what we can say or think about it; every being is always more—it exceeds or overflows—sense or meaning.
A being is present to us in the word, but it is always more than the word. The “unthinkable” remains. There always remains the “mystery” of each and every “thing.” Similarly, there always remains the inexhaustible depth of Being (be-ing)— the singular ontological temporal process or “way” (the Being-way) whereby and wherein all “things” come to be. For this very reason, Being has so many names in Heidegger’s thinking, among them: physis, aletheia, the primordial Logos, kosmos, hen, Ereignis, Lichtung. And it is our task to name Being—the inexhaustible “it” that “gives” (Es gibt)—yet again in our own way and in our own words.
So beings have an infinite temporal depth. Hence being is time.
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Are you using the term “positivist” with regard to Heidegger as a metaphor? Because, in my view, Heidegger is almost as far from positivism as it is possible to be. He always wrote that philosophy is, in its essence, dark.
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You see, in these moments, I always remain dissatisfied, because this and similar descriptions add nothing new to what even a child knows. It’s like an infinitely closed logical chain of reasoning, which, after 10, 20, or 100 iterations, returns to the original thought.
So, roughly speaking, it turns out that the book has been written, but it adds nothing to what even a child knows. This isn’t a criticism of you personally. But it’s a criticism of philosophizing and philosophy itself. We often become immersed in this cycle of iterations, where we remain forever. There’s no escape.
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Yes. Metaphorically. Husserl once wrote that phenomenology was the true positivism. Heidegger is what positivism “should be.” He enacts its intention better than they did. His philosophy is radically empirical and therefore intensely temporal.
Likewise Bakhtin is a “true” positivist.
It’s largely forgotten these days that early positivists were often phenomenalists. This is already non-dual, the identification of experience and reality, the leap out of the alienated and constraining assumption that experience is internal mind-stuff.
Positivism wanted to “get around” metaphysics-in-the-pejorative-sense, to the “positive” or what shows itself from itself. Less intense and powerful positivists, those known by the term, were metaphysically naive about language, for instance. They presupposed the “secure presence of universal essences” in order to derive analytic “truths.” So “truth” for them was still “in words.” They weren’t honest or open enough about experience to escape an old empiricist ideology that hid its theology in language. Yet the “empirical directive” is a vector that can be followed with more intensity, against and through prejudices about language.
For Heidegger, as I read him, truth is the revelation of reality itself. Not a word-stuff.