On Sat, 22 Jul 1995, Lois Shawver wrote:
> Yes. I understand what you're saying, but I am surprised. I hadn't had
> such an interpretation of B&T. I don't consider myself an expert,
> though, and I intend to challenge you. Still, I wonder if you would mind
> referringg me to a passage or so that leads you to this particular
> reading so I can see it the way you do. What I'm missing is grounds for
> assuming that Heidegger is positing a metaphysical structure that shapes
> experience either as authenticity or inauthenticity. Let me change
> that. I don't want to see your 'grounds for assuming' it. I just want
> to be able to see some piece of text that suggests that to you so I can
> understand your reading.
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Well, I'm not sure that I'm prepared to get embroiled in a debate as to
whether Heidegger's early philosophy is meant to get at the way things
_really_ are. Suffice it to say that I surely do think this is what he's
doing. I realize there is another strand of interpretation that makes a
kind of global relativist or "perspectivalist" out of Heidegger, but since
I am so profoundly unsympathetic to relativism and perspectivalism, and
since I want to read Heidegger as charitably as I can, I do not interpret
him as such a relativist. I understand him to have been a systematic
philosopher and a metaphysician in the noblest senses of these terms-- a
metaphysician of a *broadly* Kantian variety (I say broadly because the
last thing I'd want to do here is suggest more of a parallel than there
really is).
Anyway, as for my belief that authenticity and inauthenticity are grounded
in basic ontological components of Dasein, I suppose the reaon for that is
just that both authentic and inauthentic being-towards-death are
possibilities of Dasein only insofar as both existence and fallenness are
fundamental ontological (yeah, here I would say "metaphysical") structures
of it. Dasein can be inauthentic only insofar as fallenness into the
they-self is part of its basic constitution, and it can be authentic only
insofar as it is also essentially a kind of self-understanding. I'm not
sure what passages in the book would be most relevant to my comments here,
but I expect you can see what motivates my interpretation.
Anyway, I realize mine is probably not the most popular account of
Heidegger's early philosophy, but I'm perfectly comfortable with that.
Sincerely,
David Schenk.
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