Heidegger

Primarily concerned with metaphysical question of the meaning of Being. If being is predicated on maniforld meanings, then what is its leading fundamental meaning? What does Being mean?

Heidegger treats phen. as pure method, discusses the way phenomen fail to appear: see quote 310.

DASEIN

For Heidegger humans beings were first creatures concerned about their fate in an alien world. Heidegger's phenomenology discloses a qualitativly rich human, not just rich in qualitative features of knowing.

The Question of Being

H's diagnosis: we've largely lost the qbility to wonder at the meaning of Being. we wonder only at the being of specific beings.

Aristotle and Scholastics relegated question of Being to logical category (higherst genus), didn't think of it a as a pervasive feature of existence. traditional metaphysics needs to be overcome.

Diagnosis of modern age: read bottom of 314. failure to appreciate Being leaves us alienated.

Ordinary thinking by us as beings about other beings must give way to a thinking which puts us in the presence of Being.

Human Being in a Human World

Heidegger is contributing to long line of answers to the question of distinctiveness of human being His answer: to have a world.

Husserl and Heidegger would agree that the worlds of science and other disciplines are some among many environing worlds. Both would agree that science is dehumanizing. Each wants us to take off the Cartesean spectacles that give rise to materialistic worlds.

Follow quote on Dasein: 317.

Features of Dasein's being that distinguish it from others': first, it comports itself toward things in its world -- doesn't just react , but responds, has attitudes. Also, has a comportment to Being itself. Second, Dasein is a choosing being, cannot avoid choosing, experiences choosing in terms of being itself or not itself (authenticity). Third, Dasein is trying to know its world, interrogate beings and its own relation to Being.

Existence: Only Dasein exists. Other beings are but do not exist.

passages on 319 yield the distinctions between present at hand or categorial and Being alongside or ready to hand or existentiale

Example of a hammer: has both dimensions.

323: Dasein's Concern: Living ahead (this feature explains why we don't have a nature. we are always to be) This is an existential burden for Heidegger.

The Human Predicament

Facticity: the brute fact of our existence, together with the awareness of the impossibility of a fundamental explanation of it in itself.

Throwness: the feeling you get from an awreness of your facticity. accounts for a feeling of homelessness and ultimately anxiety about our place in the world.

Anxiety: Heideggerian existential anxiety is not about or in the face of some entity but in the face of our Being in the world as such. Real anxiety is rare since we have so many ruses to avoid it.

Inauthenticity: Escape into the "they" self or social self. 313: fallenness or the everyday as inauthenticity.

Authenticity: living in and with anxiety, awareness of our Being toward an end, in anticipation of death

©1997 by Mark Alfino, Department of Philosophy, Gonzaga University.