Heidegger on Truth and Finitude, part 3, an essay by the late John Haugeland (1945-2010)

Part 3 of my reading of John Haugeland's essay "Truth and Finitude: Heidegger's Transcendental Existentialism" published in a collection of essays entitled:
"Heidegger, authenticity, and modernity: essays in honor of Hubert Dreyfus" (2000) ed. by Dreyfus, Wrathall, and Malpas

Category:

Education

Tags:

• heidegger
• dreyfus
• haugeland
• disclosedness
• being
• entities
• philosophy
• phenomenology
• truth
• ontology
• dasein
• comportment
• mind
• christianity
• science

[Israe5l]

You did talk about infinite regress. Maybe I was thinking on the same line. Desien investigates Being. But Desien is inside of Being. So there is infinte circularity. And with this, Desien eludes from any kind of formal system such as set theory. (Therefore, one need not worry about mental entities. We can settle ontology with Matter/Life.)

Thinking beyond formal system is how Desien thinks, I think.

[emblemOFbeing]

@Israe5l 'inside of being'? Well, being 'is' not a thing obviously, as if we could characterize being (or the world) as container for the sum total or 'all beings' (the contained). Heidegger does lay out the structure being-in-the-world-- Dasein is *essentially* in-the-world; must understand 'in' as 'dwelling', 'habitare' (concernful), not container-contained, etc., Saying Dasein (or anything) is 'in being' = misinterpretation. Dasein is the being whose very being is at issue for it.

[emblemOFbeing]

@Israe5l I don't think we can 'settle' ontology, esp. w/ the category dualism: Matter/Life. Far too narrow, and (not that this is necessarily decisive) blurred. This is a kind of in-itself / for-itself trap. Humans esp are irreducible to 'living matter'. Also, I'm both matter and life at once, ie my hand is touched (as material object) and I touch with my hand (as sentient, lived-bodily, life).

finally, what would you uphold as the fund. ont. diff. between a living being & its dead corpse?

[Israe5l]

Is the instrument that you speak same as technology? I know heidegger wrote a book on it.

Actuality, is this same as existence? I am not sure of the relashion between: essence, what it is, and what I called being.

And of course, you touched on Being in the end. My concrete definition (life/matter) is going to be chucked by the question: What [is] is? Simply: what it means to exist. Which seems to me more pressing for Life.

[emblemOFbeing]

2 Essence (Wesen) is not understood metaphysically as timeless 'essentia' (eg quidditas) but as in the old Germanic Wesan (to dwell, stay): as the temporal way of unfolding, presencing, & enduring of the being of an entity. Dasein's essence = existence; being-in-relation-to characterizes the unfolding of Dasein being-in-the-world, in each case 'mine'; comportment to other beings and to himself; this is possible only bc he already understands being. His ontology is too complex for a comment box.

[Israe5l]

True, Being is not only collection of objects. And I could see my categorization of Matter/Life is rubbing you wrong. Being is not all exaustive. But Being is what exist all (it includes thought and the thought can include Being.) Only Life can have thought. And Matter doesn't.

[emblemOFbeing]

@Israe5l Haugeland was first and foremost a philosopher, and might be described--probably not without some tesion created in the process--as an ex-neo-pragmatist turned neo-existentialist. I don't see much in the way of physics making its way into Haugeland's writings except a big concern w/ the questions concerning objectivity and the way history, everyday scientific practices, human society + the individual human being, form, work within (and re-form) paradigms of scientific understanding.

[Israe5l]

Clearing? I will think about that.

[emblemOFbeing]

For Heidegger, existence doesn't refer to the usual, metaphysically understood 'existentia' (ie present-at-handness of an entity). Existence has a very special meaning for him: the human being's ek-sistence (standing out into the truth of being, as the 'clearing' of being). This 'standing outside oneself into the open region of being where beings can come to presence', or Dasein's being-in-the-world, is made to counteract any misunderstanding of human beings as self-enclosed subject vs objects