Re: BT, Section 45

My name is Malcolm Riddoch and I have been following the postings on Being
and Time since early June, the problem of an 'authentic projection of
being' is one I am currently working on as well and so I would like to post
a few notes on section 45:

The existential analytic of Dasein interprets being here in terms of the
falling thrown understanding of 'care' (a reinterpretation of ego cogito?)
within its already disclosed world. And it is in terms of this 'primordial'
interpretation of truth as disclosedness that Heidegger approaches the
temporality of Dasein where:

<to lay bare the horizon within which something like Being in general
becomes intelligible, is tantamount to clarifying the possibility of having
any understanding of Being at all - an understanding which itself belongs
to the constitution of the [being] called Dasein> (BT p. 274).

Our pre-ontological understanding of being (and its copula) is
characteristic of existence as a thrown 'potentiality-for-being'. In these
terms, we are an understanding potentiality, one which "is free either for
authenticity or for inauthenticity or for a mode in which neither of these
has been differentiated" (p. 275). This historically situated understanding
of being would be something of the 'hermeneutical situation' in which we
find ourselves and that must be deconstructed (in the Husserlian sense of
Destruktion?) in order to posit an 'authentic' relation to truth as
disclosedness.
And here, Heidegger posits the possibility of the transcendental truth of
being, experienced in the authentic existential projection where:

<authentic disclosedness shows the phenomenon of the most primordial truth
in the mode of authenticity. The most primordial, and indeed the most
authentic, disclosedness in which Dasein, as a potentiality-for-Being, can
be, is the truth of existence> (p. 264).

Yet this 'truth' is not necessarily of the sort that can be primarily
understood in terms of a meaningful experience, given the devaluing or
dislocation of truth as logical assertion. This seems to be something of
the problem as far as the movement from an inauthentic to authentic
relation to 'truth' is concerned. And this movement involves an
appreciation of the <temporal structure exhibited in the distinctive
experience of "being-toward-death"> (Miller 13/7). The transcendental
(pseudo-mystical) experience of being, in the defamiliarization of
Heidegger's meditation on death, is access to the 'authenticity' of
disclosedness, or the immediacy of existence.
It is this transcendental or projective methodology of _BT_, its 'making
strange', that I have problems with, because through it <shifts from
authentic to inauthentic or inauthentic to authentic modes of existence are
made possible> (Schenk 16/7). At the moment, the question that I am
attempting to ask is - in what senses could this 'ecstatic freedom towards
death' be said to be entangled with a metaphysics of transcendence (in
terms of metaphysics as an obliteration of being)? And might this emphasis
on being as the transcendens be responsible in some way for the subsequent
failure to posit the sense or 'meaning' of being as such in terms of
temporality?

I find this mailing list rather interesting and hope that these notes add
to the debate on the question of authenticity.

Thanks.




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