Reading Log 2023

[Jackson]

Intentions

I've found that when tackling books like this, it helps to paraphrase and parse out the meaning derived from each reading session. The notes might be raw (and wrong), but it seems a waste to read a text like this without giving it the further thought that note-taking necessitates.

In the past I've tried doing this in a private notebook, but I always end up abandoning it. My hope is that using a public forum like this one will keep me (and anyone else who joins in) accountable. And even if I'm just throwing shit out into the void - no matter, that's what the internet is for.

I'm a dilettante at best when it comes to philosophy, so if my unqualified and woeful interpretations inspire others to set me straight - more the better.

Tools for the job

I'm using the Harper Perennial edition of B&T, plus The Shorter Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy to look up stuff I don't understand.

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In short - please join in!

[Jackson]

0-24

jesus here we go… from the intro:

there is no ontology without phenomenology. you can’t understand the nature of things without understanding the nature of the thing that apprehends them (i.e. consciousness - “transcendental subjectivity”)

therefore we have to understand what we mean by *‘*Being’, as the concept underpins our understanding of literally everything else - including ourselves.

the concept is universal and an understanding is presupposed buuuutt H points out that - asked to describe what ‘being’ is - most of us would respond with “uhhhhhhh…”

So, let’s tackle the question of Being.

But in order to do so, surely we need to start by looking at something in particular which has this property of being?

Uh - oh! Circular logic alert: how do you find an entity with the property of ‘being’ to base all this on, when we’ve readily acknowledged we haven’t got a clue *what Being is*?

Not to worry. H assures us that there is *some* provisional knowledge of Being. After all, we're able to ascribe the quality to entities pretty confidently. I have 'Being'. This computer has 'Being'.

And those are valid ontological assumptions - but they don't quite get to the heart of what Being is. So instead of going circular we need to take a step backwards from this universal usage to figure out what 'Being' really means, in and of itself.

We bandy it about all the time so it obviously means something to us. What is it?

[Jackson]

We have a basic, naive understanding of Being as it is confined to specific subject-matter. Science. Maths. Literature. Whatever. We understand what it means for something to be scientific as opposed to literary, for example.

But then we, the entities who define those concepts, have a Being all of our own. We’re entities too. So any rough, ontological definition of something’s Being we come up with is merely the product of our own Being - which is still a total mystery.

“But since every such area is itself obtained from the domain of entities themselves, this preliminary research, from which the basic concepts are drawn, is nothing more than an interpretation of those entities [i.e. us] with regard to their basic state of Being.”

So there’s a *root* Being - our own - that’s aware of itself and the being of other things. This is Dasein. (Extensive translation notes in the text but Routledge equates it with “human being” and that's absolutely fine by me).

“It is distinguished by the fact that, in its very Being, that Being is an issue for it”.

I.e. our being is self-reflexive. a chair’s Being is not.

Specifically, Dasein sees itself in relationship to a sort of being called “existence”.

And that is the very condition of its Being! Being a human means being concerned with Being!!

this is gonna be a long ride

[Jackson]

So we’ve established that Dasein is “ontico-ontologically prior”. It precedes any ontological interpretation of other entities.

But this doesn’t mean it’s something that can be grasped “immediately” (which i interpret as akin to saying, it’s not intuitiveor just a given). On the contrary - because dasein is aware of Being and able to interpret Being in the world around it, those understandings of Being are always “reflected back” on dasein itself.

So, the *true* meaning of our own Being remains foreign to us - because we use our understandings of other entities in the world to inform our understandings of our own Being. It’s a loop.

"Because Dasein is ontico-ontologically prior, its own specific state of Being […] remains concealed from it" (37)

OK right so, everything we thought we knew about our own Being is just a subjective reflection of our own mental state. nothing objective. so where do we start if we’re to find the actualmeaning of the Being of dasein? Enter:

TIME

“Whenever Dasein tacitly understands and intereprets something like being, it does so with time as its standpoint. Time must be brought to light-and genuinely conceived-as the horizon for all understanding of Being and for any way of interpreting it.” (39)

But not just any ordinary, layperson understanding of time. oh no. this is Heidegger Time with a capital T.

‘Time’ has long been used to make ontological judgements. We assume things that have *temporality* (i.e. they exist ‘in time’) could be said to have Being.

And H accepts this. time is the “horizon” for our understanding of Being (”Being cannot be grasped except by taking time into consideration”, 40)

So, to understand being, we have to think about it in terms of time. But yikes, things that have a Being outside of time (e.g. an emotion, a concept) still have Being don’t they?

So we’ve gotta broaden our definition of temporality* if we’re going to use it as the plane on which we apprehend the meaning of Being. What does Being look like in time?

Hence we can refine the task at hand for a clearer brief:

"Thus the fundamental ontological task of Interpreting being as such includes working out the Temporality of Being." (40)

[Jackson]

This should be a 10pp per day kinda thing

[Jackson]

In which we establish that existing in history is not enough to determine the form of Being which applies to Dasein

Here's a bit of a mind melter from pp 30-40. What seems to help in retrospect is laying the terms out in a nested-hierarchy:


Temporality: to have temporality means to be of time/related to time. This therefore includes entities which are 'non-temporal'.

Historicality: to have historicality means to be of history/related to history (not in the grand sense, but something more like chronological time). But like the above, this therefore includes entities which are 'ahistorical'.

History: the product of our "historizing", i.e. the way we situate entities on a chronological timeframe. Including ourselves.



Dasein is uniquely capable of historizing. One of the conditions of our Being is being able to situate ourselves in history, and perceive our own existence in terms of past/present/future.

But we can only do that because our Being has the quality of historicality. And this elemental quality of our Being is still hidden from us.

If we go back to the hierarchical list, we can see that having a "history" is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to determining our Being. Because "history" is created by us. It's the product of our intrinsic historicality - and that's exactly where the meaning of our Being is to be found.

So maybe another way to put the question 'what does it mean to be a human Being?' is to say:

'What does it mean to be an entity which can create history, and situate itself within it?'

[H then recounts how Kant, Descartes and the Greeks effectively shirked this question via various means I’m not well versed enough to understand]

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This feels tangential but interesting:

Dasein “historizes” out of its own future. our Being might be said to comprise of repeatedly taking from the future and pushing it behind us - turning it into the past - so for H the past “is not something which follows along after Dasein, but something which already goes ahead of it”. (40)

[Jackson]

50 - 70

As the reality of reading such a complex text with virtually zero prior knowledge set in, my enthusiasm for reading Being and Time began to wane. Not helped by the fact that this edition leaves Heidegger’s extensive use of Greek and Latin terminology untranslated, and footnotes by and large only exist to refer back to the German original.

As a teacher, I’d encourage students to push on through Shakespeare’s unfamiliar language - maintaining that they’d osmotically absorb at least a general sense of the plot even if whole scenes went completely over their head. I stand by the approach with fiction, but a philosophical text like this presents quite a different challenge. If we assume that its purpose is purely informational or expository (and there's an argument to say that it's not), what is there to be gained if one simply doesn’t ‘get it’?

My approach since returning to Being and Time has been to consider it a sort of mental gym. I haven’t the intellectual strength to manage more than a twenty page workout and my technique isn't very good, but there are incremental gains nonetheless. Yes, reading this makes your head hurt - but it's a good burn.

So at the end of the Introduction, I glean only that Heidegger is describing the paradox of using phenomenology to uncover the phenomenon of being. Phenomenology = "to the things themselves!" in the words of Husserl. But then what if being a thing is the phenomenon itself we are trying to apprehend? The phenomenon of being a phenomenon? Not the phenomenology of being a… bird, for example. but the base level phenomenon of being any kind of phenomenon at all. I can't follow any solution to this problem (assuming one is even given - I can't quite tell).

Anyway, owing to my complete ignorance of the text, I was only dimly aware that this first part was an intro devoted to defining the problem at hand and laying out the materials for the investigation. From here we enter Part 1 proper with a warning of sorts concerning the “awkwardness and ‘inelegance’ of expression in the analyses to come”. Yikes.

Indeed my bird analogy above is a serious no no, because Heidegger reminds us that “Dasein does not have the kind of Being which belongs to something merely present-at-hand within the world […] So neither is it to be presented thematically as something we come across in the same way as we come across what is present-at-hand”. This then explains the total absence of analogy or rhetorical device which might aid comprehension. Dasein can’t be likened to anything we already know because it is the entity that gives rise to that knowing, and therefore of a totally different order of existence. There is no language fit for the task because our language has been developed to describe things “merely present-at-hand within the world”. But damn if Heidegger ain’t going to wrestle it to his will regardless.

[Jackson]

76-86

Another random formulation of the problem at hand: here we are trying to discover the being or definition of the *sum* in Descartes’ cogito ergo sum.

How the analytic of Dasein is an entirely different question to that raised by biology, anthropology, and sociology.

Scheler, Dilthey, and others’ concept of human being doesn’t satisfy Heidegger because it defines it in negative terms. They suggest it is not a ‘substance’ or a ‘thing’ but some sort of transcendent whole that exceeds the sum of its parts, and which is itself barely defined. Some suggestion that this mode of thinking has its origins in Christian theology.

My own read: psych, anthropology, and biology define human being via its experience and doing of things without investigating the thinghood of Dasein itself. As Heidegger says, if a human is simply “a performer of acts” then what does it mean to Be a “performer” independent of the acts being performed?

Being-in-the-world’ as the basic state of Dasein

To be a human being is to ‘be in the world’. But what makes the “inhood” of Dasein different to that of a chair, which is also “in the world” but in a totally different way?

In Heidegger’s terms, the chair is something merely “present-at-hand” within the world whereas Dasein’s being in the world entails a much more complex relationship.

Central to this is Dasein’s ability to perceive itself as being ‘present-at-hand’ (just like the chair) even though that same perception elevates it far above the existential status of anything present-at-hand.

Facticity: wherever Dasein is, it is present-at-hand.

Basically we can conceive of ourselves as ‘things’ even though our thinghood is very different to that of a chair.

On knowing the world

Concern is our primary means of knowing the world we are in (as in, we concern ourselves with the world whereas ordinary things present-at-hand do not).

This “knowing the world” is the primary manifestation of Dasein’s unique way of being-in-the-world but we confine ourselves to a knowledge of the world itself, not our own being in it.