On Fri, 1 Dec 1995 colin.wilder@xxxxxxxx wrote:
> Where do these concepts of natality, protention, retention and
> present-to-itself come from? Are they in regards to temporality? I don't
> know them from BT or the handful of other work I've read. Are they from
> Levinas? Could you explain their meaning, because now your thoughts are
> less comprensible to me - 'you have long known what they refer to, but I
> myself find that I have long since forgotten' [cute, huh?].
I had Levinas on the brain -- protention and retention are his, part of
his critique of Heidegger's ontology of presence,in _Otherwise than Being._
'Natality 'and 'present to itself' I might have just made up -- being
creative and all. Well, natalality is just a better way of saying what I
meant by creativity, which you later refer to, in this post, as birth.
Creativity includes natality, but is not limited to it, as I see it -- and
it is to broad a term to indicate what I meant.
> Can you explain to me your reasoning for boldly stating that Dasein must
> CREATE its ownmost meaing? I imagine you equate "meaning" with
> "possibility," which seems reasonable. [Yes.] Why do you connect
nullity/nothing > with this creativity?
Mmmm. I am trying to rework the concept of nothing away from the
death-drive-metaphysics towards a productive/creative/positive force for
being. It sounds kind of silly, now that I write it, but I am really very
bothered by Heidegger's emphasis on death and dying.
I don't know if this is very satisfying for you.... Perhaps I am
mistaken to smuggle in alien tems, and I should stay within the
Heideggerian framework; but I am trying to express something to which I
do believe he points, but which his own words/discorse do not allow me to
express; and I am trying to see if I can make it fit his picture, by
comparing the project of fundamental ontoly which he abandons
and the later directionality of his work. I believe he was headed there
but never arrived. :) Is this any better?
> >Heidegger could have gotten at temporality via natality and creativity,
> >but does not. WHY? WHY DEATH AND DYING AS A FOCUS, AS MEANINGFUL? What
> >does this say about Heidegger, that he was apparently blind to this
> >possibility, and what does it say about phenomenology?
>
> In my hubris I think I understand the reasoning for the choice of death as
> the phenomenon to analyze. I hope this doesn't sound too facile.
> Heidegger has made his project the analysis of existential phenomena of
> Dasein's being in the world. Through exposition of e.g. idle talk, das
> Man, and anxiety he is giving a presentation of the way Dasein conceives of
> its being and the was it IS in the world. But how can such analysis grasp
> the whole being of Dasein? As there-being, its being is encapsulated by
> birth and death, which are at least prima facie the ontic limits of Dasein.
[Yes, so why choose death and not birth -- my natality -- to work from?]
> (I've wondered why he didn't touch the phenomenon of birth, which probably
> is as dificult to think as is death.) Several people on this channel have
> suggested alternate phenomena, such as love or boredom (which H later
> analyses), but it seems clear that neither of these pertain to an
> incapsulation of Dasein's being in the way that the examination of its
> actual limit (death) does. (Neither could help us get at Dasein's being as
> a whole, because neither display the actual limits of Dasein's being. Who
> knows what he might have to say on love or hatred.
I do believe than an ontological-existential analysis of love is needed.
There are two problems with this, love is not non-relational, and love
may not serve as death in bringing the whole of Dasein into perspective.
(And I think birth, or natality, would be better here.)
I take these problems seriously, but I also want to stress the
unintelligibility, for me, of death as a limit concept. The need to
totalize Dasein and Being is itself suspect for me. (And it may be that
Love is perfect *because* it cannot totalize and because it is not
non-relational.)
Love, which Levinas calls eros [and need is its negative component], is
still the most promising and unexplored path to access Being. In
_Totality and Infinity_ Levinas gives his account, which has its
problems, but is convincing to a certain extent; of course, Levinas is
not interested in the project of fundamental ontology, so he does not
have the needs Heidegger had in B&T. Unfortunately, Levinas drops the
concept of eros by his later work, _Otherwise than Being._
> To talk of the 'meaningfulness' of death is something I'm quite
> weary to do, because to my recollection he doesn't write of it as
> meaningful, but rather as a possibility which if anticipated leads to an
> individualization of Dasein and a displacement of das Man-Selbst, hence
> authenticity. Which leads me back to the earlier question, why it is that
> you place nothing and natality as the locus for CREATING meaning. I don't
> read authenticity as the creation of meaning but rather the acceptance of
> the meaningfulness of equipment (which might be what Gelassenheit refers
> to).
A good point... I would have to go back to the Aristotelian spirit of the
B&T and argue that death/dying functions as a sort of telos for Dasein.
Deat gives meaning to Dasein qua telos.
Dasein creates meaning from nullity in the sense that it realizes its
authentic being in the face of nullity, as part of its three fold
structure. Now, 'creates meanining' might be wrong, too strong a term --
but if we look at Heidegger's saying that Dasein is primordially in truth
and untruth , in this sense Dasein does create meaning, truth and
untruth, for itself. This is a feeble attempt, and I need to think it
through some more...
It's been nice chatting with you,
rita
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