Re: Is there any such thing as 'Being'?

[Nick Dippie <nd603@soton.ac.uk>]

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ok i'm going to try and be brief here, cos of exams etc, but i'm not sure i
agree with your breakdown of heidegger paul.it's possible that i've
entirely misunderstood you, but it seems to me that you might have
misconstrued one of his main purposes.

you say

the question that faced usat beginning: ?Is there any such thing as
'Being'??  As a resultof our investigations and reflections, another
question has arisen inresponse to the first: ?If there is any such thing as
'Being', thenwhat can we know of it??  Such questions appear at once
fundamentaland, in the same breath, empty.

i think heidegger wantsto go further back than this, to ask why we are
asking these questions, and to eventually argue that because of our nature,
these questions are in fact meaningless. much of his work (especially 'Being
and Time', which is all i've really studied) is based around this:

[N]ot only [does] the question of Being [lack] an answer, but ... the
question itself is obscure and without direction. So if it is to be
revived, this means that we must first work out an adequate way of
formulating it. (BT24)

so he is looking for a way of formulating the question, and to do that he
wants to know WHO is formulating the questions, who we are. He refers to
'us' (beings who questions things like this) as Dasein, and much of Being
and Time is given over to a discussion of the Being (or nature) of Dasein,
and the conclusions he draws from this tends to render many of the classic
problems of philosophy nonsense.

the key point here is that Dasein's Being is essentially Being-in-the-World,
which means that we cannot possibly exist outside of the spatio-temporal
framework that the world around us provides. if you think of any object,
you think of it within a context, within certain surroundings - like Kant
before him (although with a different slant) he doesn't believe we can even
imagine anything outside of the world. if this is true (and since this is an
email, not an essay, i won't go into his arguments) then it renders the
problem of scepticism meaningless - if we are essentially
Being-in-the-world then talking about the possibility of just being a
thinking thing (a la Descartes) is simply nonsense, we cannot exist outside
of a world.

thats a gross oversimplification i know, but i think thats the thrust of it.

one other thing - you said

when talkingabout the cup we could say that it IS for such-and-such a
purpose(drinking) and IS, in addition to its colour, a certain shape
(mainlycylindrical).  Which of these properties is essential to
thedefinition: to the concept of 'cup-ness'?  Which 'is' takes
priorityhere?


is this about the distinction between the ready and the present-to-hand?
because Heidegger does provide a breakdown between the two.the
present-to-hand is the factual properties of the thing; its colour, shape,
weight etc. the ready-to-hand is the things usable properties - its
'cupness' for your example.a cup could also be used to store pens, or
thrown at someone, these are all ready-to-hand properties. Heidegger
doesn't want to suggest that either is metaphysically prior to the other,
but the ready-to-hand tends to be closer to our consciousness than the
present-to-hand. to use Mulhall's example - the painting on the wall i'm
looking at is closer to me than the glasses on my nose that i'm looking
through, because thats where my attention is directed.

this is actually where the thrust of his argument for Being-in-the-world
comes from, from the fact that Dasein are essentially tool-using creatures,
and to use, for example a hammer, we need to know so many things about the
consistency of the hammer, the wood, whats its purpose is, etc, all these
present-to-hand facts, that it makes no sense to talk about us outside of a
world, we are too involved for that.


right i've got a horrible feeling i've just gone off on a completely
different tangent to the one you were actually talking about, but its been
useful for me to go over that in my head again so hopefully it'll be of
interest to some of you too!

nick




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