Dasein’s Shadow and the Moment of its Disappearance

In his 1937 lectures, Heidegger searches for Nietzsche’s initial thought of “the Moment”. This paper mimics Heidegger’s pursuit of Nietzsche’s Moment by tracing Heidegger’s own early arrival at the Moment in Being and Time, published 10 years prior to his lectures on Nietzsche. Both Zarathustra and Dasein are chased in and out of an authentic relationship with the Moment by their own shadows, which disappear at midday. Dasein’s shadow is the being that is always closest-at-hand, the being in whom I lose myself in everyday care. Dasein forgets itself in inauthentically securing its identity in that which it cares for and that which it is not, darkness. Yet Dasein also confronts its own finitude in its negative double as it witnesses the daily dwindling of its shadow—the everyday passing away of time.     

From the they to the we: Heideggerian antonomology

This paper argues that there exists a Heideggerian antonomology and this not only in the broad sense of a simple study (λ?γο?), but also in the strict sense of a full doctrine (-λογ?α) of personal pronouns (?ντωνυμ?α). Traversing the whole of Heidegger’s work, I reconstitute the framework of this antonomology, from the connection of mineness and ipseity, to the difference between the I and the Self within the precedence of the latter over the former. I then rehearse its drama, from the They who answers the question of the who of Dasein to the We who asks the question of the who of man.     

Making sense of Heidegger’s ‘phenomenology of the inconspicuous’ or inapparent (<Emphasis Type="Italic">Phänomenologie des Unscheinbaren</Emphasis>)

In Heidegger’s last seminar, which was in Zähringen in 1973, he introduces what he called a “phenomenology of the inconspicuous” (Phänomenologie des Unscheinbaren). Despite scholars’ occasional references to this “approach” over the last 40 years, this approach of Heidegger’s has gone largely under investigated in secondary literature. This article introduces three different, although not necessarily conflicting ways in which these sparse references to inconspicuousness can be interpreted: (1) The a priori of appearance can never be brought to manifestation, and the unscheinbar (inconspicuous) is interwoven with the 相似文献   

Helen and Heidegger: Disabled Dasein,Language and Others

Abstract

Both Heidegger’s Being and Time and Helen Keller’s The Story of my Life address the problem of what it means for humans to be optimally human. In reading these texts together, I hope to show that Helen’s life-story confirms Heidegger’s existential analyses to some extent, but also, importantly, poses a challenge to them with respect to the interrelated issues of disability, language and others. Heidegger’s hermeneutic explication of what it means to be human is intended to uncover supposedly basic human existential structures. As a fore-structure for this explication, Heidegger projects an already able-bodied, self-sufficient adult, resolutely engaged in daily activity. I shall argue, however, that it is due to this starting-point in adult-Dasein that Heidegger’s existential analyses miss important insights concerning the meaning of being human to be gained from Helen’s experience. Starting from the essentially disabled child-Dasein, Helen describes her struggle to achieve the very condition that Heidegger assumes from the start, first through rescue by the other as teacher, who offered the gift of language and community, and thereafter in her grasp of language as a “pharmakon.” I hope to show in the end that Helen’s experience of a struggle for humanity offers the model for an alternative projection, that of an essentially disabled and needy Dasein, which, I believe, provides a more viable fore-structure than Heidegger’s for a hermeneutics of humanity.     

On (the) nothing: Heidegger and Nishida

Two major twentieth century philosophers, of East and West, for whom the nothing is a significant concept are Nishida Kitarō and Martin Heidegger. Nishida’s basic concept is the absolute nothing (zettai mu) upon which the being of all is predicated. Heidegger, on the other hand, thematizes the nothing (Nichts) as the ulterior aspect of being. Both are responding to Western metaphysics that tends to substantialize being and dichotomize the real. Ironically, however, while Nishida regarded Heidegger as still trapped within the confines of Western metaphysics with its tendency to objectify, Heidegger’s impression of Nishida was that he is too Western, that is, metaphysical. Yet neither was too familiar with the other’s philosophical work as a whole. I thus compare and assess Nishida’s and Heidegger’s discussions of the nothing in their attempts to undermine traditional metaphysics while examining lingering assumptions about the Nishida–Heidegger relationship. Neither Nishida nor Heidegger means by “nothing” a literal nothing, but rather that which permits beings in their relative determinacy to be what they are and wherein or whereby we find ourselves always already in our comportment to beings. Nishida characterizes this as a place (basho) that negates itself to give rise to, or make room for, beings. For Heidegger, being as an event (Ereignis) that clears room for beings, releasing each into its own, is not a being, hence nothing. We may also contrast them on the basis of the language they employ in discussing the nothing. Yet each seemed to have had an intuitive grasp of an un/ground, foundational to experience and being. And in fact their paths cross in their respective critiques of Western substantialism, where they offer as an alterantive to that substantialist ontology, in different ways, what I call anontology.     

Understanding the Heart-Mind Within the Heart-Mind of the <Emphasis Type="Italic">Nèiyè</Emphasis> (<Emphasis Type="Italic">Inward Training</Emphasis>)

The Nèiyè 內業 (Inward Training) talks of “a heart-mind (xīn 心) within a heart-mind” that is somehow connected to or prior to language. In the context of the overall advice on looking “inward” or “internally” as part of the meditation and mysticism practice that the Nèiyè introduces, this talk of a heart-mind within a heart-mind arguably invites comparisons with a Cartesian “inner theater” conception of mentality. In this paper, I examine the “inner” talk of the Nèiyè in order to tease out its identifiable commitments in philosophical psychology. I consider the ways in which the “inner” talk of the text might be read as marking out one or more of three different inner/outer distinctions, and I argue that we can consistently read the Nèiyè without seeing it as marking any inner/outer distinction that is related to what is often referred to in English as “inner experience.”     

九鬼周造的偶然哲学与情绪论:和海德格尔哲学的比较

九鬼周造可谓真正与海德格尔的《存在与时间》进行交锋的日本哲学家。九鬼曾出席海氏两年讲座与讨论班,娴熟其哲学,留学归国后,花费毕生精力建构了偶然性的哲学。在此过程中,海氏成为其最大的思想对手。针对海氏可能性的存在论,九鬼提出偶然性的存在论。海氏主张此在的“被抛一筹划”“非本真一本真”“遮蔽一解蔽”等生存论结构,显露出其哲学涵盖了人从非现实的可能状态朝向现实的必然状态发展的向度。九鬼认为这种从可能存在到必然存在的发展过程中缺乏偶然性,正意味着潜在的无限可能性之丧失。支撑海氏的此在生存论结构的正是“畏”这一人的根本情绪。针对畏这个情绪,九鬼提出惊讶的情绪。因为他认为拥抱原始偶然的人,必会不断地涌现惊讶之情,生命也因此有无限的实现可能性。哲学亦须“始于惊讶,终于惊讶”,才能有无限的发展可能性。     

Evolution and the meaning of being: Heidegger,Jonas and Nihilism

Hans Jonas accuses Heidegger of “never bring[ing] his question about Being into correlation with the testimony of our physical and biological evolution.” Neither the early nor later Heidegger has a “philosophy of nature,” Jonas charges, because Naturphilosophie demands a new concept of matter, a monistic account of cosmogony and evolution, and the grounding of ethical responsibility for future generations in an ontological “first principle.” Jonas’s ontological rethinking of Darwinism allows him to overcome the nihilism that a mechanistic interpretation of evolution forces upon us: a nihilism allegedly shared by Heidegger. I imagine a Heideggerian response to Jonas, and ask whether the dream of recovering a synthesis between cosmogony and moral insight has been irrecoverably shattered by modern natural science.     

Heidegger's Kantian idealism revisited

I offer a revised interpretation of Heidegger's ‘ontological idealism’ – his thesis that being, but not entities, depends on Dasein – as well as its relationship to Kant's transcendental idealism. I build from my earlier efforts on this topic by modifying them and defending my basic line of interpretation against criticisms advanced by Cerbone, Philipse, and Carman. In essence, my reading of Heidegger goes like this: what it means to say that ‘being’ depends on Dasein is that the criteria and standards that determine what it is to be, and hence whether an item (or anything at all) is, are conceptually interwoven with, and hence conceptually dependent upon, a structure that could not obtain without Dasein (namely, time). For this reason, to ask whether entities (e.g., nature) would exist, even if we (Dasein) did not, is either to ask an empirical question with an obvious negative answer (viz., According to our best current theories, does everything depend causally upon us?), or to ask a meaningless question with no answer (viz., If we suspend or discount the standards and criteria that determine whether anything is, does anything exist?). In short, Heidegger is an empirical realist, but neither a transcendental idealist nor realist.     

Contradictory Information: Too Much of a Good Thing

Both I and Belnap, motivated the “Belnap-Dunn 4-valued Logic” by talk of the reasoner being simply “told true” (T), and simply “told false” (F), which leaves the options of being neither “told true” nor “told false” (N), and being both “told true” and “told false” (B). Belnap motivated these notions by consideration of unstructured databases that allow for negative information as well as positive information (even when they conflict). We now experience this on a daily basis with the Web. But the 4-valued logic is deductive in nature, and its matrix is discrete: there are just four values. In this paper I investigate embedding the 4-valued logic into a context of probability. Jøsang’s Subjective Logic introduced uncertainty to allow for degrees of belief, disbelief, and uncertainty. We extend this so as to allow for two kinds of uncertainty—that in which the reasoner has too little information (ignorance) and that in which the reasoner has too much information (conflicted). Jøsang’s “Opinion Triangle” becomes an “Opinion Tetrahedron” and the 4-values can be seen as its vertices. I make/prove various observations concerning the relation of non-classical “probability” to non-classical logic.     

The traumatic origins of representation

The debate regarding representation is haunted by the fact that it takes place within a context of general suspicion whereby everything, it is claimed, is always representation. Such is the hurdle that Foucault identifies and Derrida attempts to elucidate in his debate with Heidegger, in which he takes issue with Heidegger’s critique of the “age of representation.” Derrida’s deconstruction of Heidegger’s account of the history of representation leads to a reconstruction that privileges the motifs of dissemination, of envoi (sending or dispatching). In art too, Derrida confronts Heidegger, this time with the aim of re-thinking the relationship between the work and what lies outside and beyond it. By framing the Derrida/Heidegger debate within a consideration of the Lascaux cave drawings, and by examining the positions of Girard, Bataille and Blanchot in relation to the question of the origins of art, it will be possible to re-draw the boundaries of representation insofar as they lie at the intersection between philosophy and art.     

Der Begriff der „Bekundung“ bei Husserl und Heidegger

The article intends to explore the extension of several Husserlian concepts and issues in Heidegger’s first lectures of the 1920s. To this extent it focuses especially on the concept of Bekundung (intimation), exposed by Husserl in the second book of his Ideas, and also discussed by Heidegger in his Freiburg lecture Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie (WS 1919/20). By following this concept both in Husserl’s theory of the constitution of materiality and causal reality, as well as in his discussion of the personal self, and by pointing out the tensions between the two perspectives, we will try to show that Heidegger’s use of the term can in several aspects be seen as an attempt to solve certain difficulties of the Husserlian perspective. Thus, we wish to sketch out a part of that complex network of continuities and differences that constitute the “common ground” of the two thinkers in the early 1920s.     

Heidegger,technology and ecology

Abstract

This article investigates Heidegger’s views on technology, specifically focussing on whether it is possible to fit Heidegger’s ideas into an ecologically minded framework. The author concludes that the question of what we should do in the wake of the technological crisis we face is inappropriate in terms of Heidegger’s philosophy, since he proposes that we should first tackle the question “What should we think?”. The question whether Heidegger’s ideas on technology provide us with new paths of action, specifically in terms of ecological practice, is flawed.     

Moral Artisanship in <Emphasis Type="Italic">Mengzi</Emphasis> 6A7

This essay investigates the structure and meaning of the Mengzi’s 孟子 analogical inferences in Mengzi 6A7. In this chapter, he argues that just as the perceptual masters allowed the discovery of our senses’ uniform preferences, the sages enabled us to recognize our hearts’ universal preferences for “order (li 理) and righteousness (yi 義).” Regarding an unresolved question of how the sages help us understand our hearts’ preferred objects as such, I propose a spectator-based moral artisanship reading as an alternative to an evaluator-focused moral connoisseurship view: the sages are moral artisans who refine their moral achievements, and people’s uniform approval of their achievements—firmly associated with “order and righteousness”—demonstrates our hearts’ same natural preferences for them. Furthermore, I argue that this chapter’s conclusion—we and the sages are of the same kind with natural moral preferences—implies the necessity of our transition from passive spectators to active moral performers for moral self-cultivation.     

Worlds in Motion: Temporality and Historicality

ABSTRACT

Worlds are always in motion; what kind of movement is at stake? In this essay, I will argue that Heidegger moves beyond Hegel by making the concept of world central to phenomenology. But how do worlds move? As history, Heidegger says; yet his initial attempt to interpret history, in the final sections of Being and Time, is at certain moments hampered by his attempt to ground the historicality of shared world in the temporality of individual Dasein. Derrida then moves beyond Heidegger by addressing paradoxes in our understanding of time and history. This allows Derrida to introduce the ethical dimension of world from the start as we are called to acknowledge that the Other brings their own world and awaits our response. Worlds are both singular and shared; and in any case, they move (and move us).     

Is There a Puzzle About How Authentic Dasein Can Act?: A Critique of Dreyfus and Rubin on Being and Time,Division II

Dreyfus and Rubin's commentary on Division II of Being and Time raises three closely related puzzles about the possibility of authenticity: (i) how could Dasein ever choose to become authentic, (ii) how could authentic Dasein ever choose to take up any particular possibility, and (iii) how could anything matter to authentic Dasein? They argue that Heidegger has a convincing answer to the first two puzzles, but they find his answer to the third “indirect and not totally convincing” (D&;R, p.?332). I argue that they should find Heidegger's answer to the third puzzle far worse than “not totally convincing”, given their interpretation of his account of anxiety, and that the answers they claim he has in response to the first two puzzles are not supported by the text. I then show that the puzzles arise from distortions in Dreyfus and Rubin's interpretation of Heidegger's account of anxiety. The puzzles dissolve once the distortions are identified.     

Is Heidegger an Orientalist or an Occidentalist European Philosopher? Disclosing the Political Factor behind Heidegger’s Representation of Chinese Thinking

Though Heidegger became a kind of conceptual companion of comparative philosophers, and a methodological example for interpreters of Daoist philosophy claiming that Zhuangzi or Laozi embodied the overcoming of Western “onto-theology,” Heidegger himself not only stressed his disbelief in the notion that Asian thinking could save the West from its “civilizational crisis” but also clearly claimed that Western thinking could emerge only through its distinction from the “mythical East.” However, at the same time, Heidegger criticized the decadence of the West, claimed the necessity of cultural rejuvenation, and then, with the failure of Germany to perform this task, seemed to turn to Chinese sources to find alternative solutions. How to understand Heidegger’s complex relationship with China? Is Heidegger an Orientalist or an Occidentalist European philosopher? Moreover, how to understand the subtle and troubling connections between Heidegger’s complex relationship with China and Heidegger’s highly “problematic” (to say the least) intellectual engagement with Nazi ideology? To what extent are Orientalism and Occidentalism are linked to Heidegger’s belief in the Nationalist-Socialists’ claims about “saving” the “European spirit”?     

Forms of Our Life: Wittgenstein and the Later Heidegger

The paper argues that an internal debate within Wittgensteinian philosophy leads to issues associated rather with the later philosophy of Martin Heidegger. Rush Rhees's identification of the limitations of the notion of a “language game” to illuminate the relation between language and reality leads to his discussion of what is involved in the “reality” of language: “anything that is said has sense‐if living has sense, not otherwise.” But what is it for living to have sense? Peter Winch provides an interpretation and application of Rhees's argument in his discussion of the “reality” of Zande witchcraft and magic in “Understanding a Primitive Society”. There he argues that such sense is provided by a language game concerned with the ineradicable contingency of human life, such as (he claims) Zande witchcraft to be. I argue, however, that Winch's account fails to answer the question why Zande witchcraft can find no application within our lives. I suggest that answering this requires us to raise the question of why Zande witchcraft “fits” with their other practices but cannot with ours, a question of “sense” which cannot be answered by reference to another language game. I use Joseph Epes Brown's account of Native American cultures (in Epes Brown 2001) as an exemplification of a form of coherence that constitutes what we may call a “world”. I then discuss what is involved in this, relating this coherence to a relation to the temporal, which provides an internal connection between the senses of the “real” embodied in the different linguistic practices of these cultures. I relate this to the later Heidegger's account of the “History of Being”, of the historical worlds of Western culture and increasingly of the planet. I conclude with an indication of concerns and issues this approach raises, ones characteristic of “Continental” rather than Wittgensteinian philosophy.     

Heidegger’s philosophical botany

Heidegger argues that for being x to count as ‘alive’ it must satisfy three metaphysical conditions. It must be (1) capable of engaging in active behaviour with (2) a form of intentional directedness that (3) offers to us a “sphere of transposition” into which we can intelligibly “transpose ourselves.” Heidegger’s discussion of these conditions, as they apply to the being of animals, is well-known. But, if his argument is sound, they ought also to apply to the being of plants (given that plants, too, belong within the domain of the living). Heidegger, unfortunately, does not supply this part of his ontology of life in any systematic detail. However, my thesis is that it is possible to interpret the nature and activities of plants, along the lines of (1)–(3), and thus to make good on Heidegger’s omission. The key to this reconstruction is a reconceptualization of plant movements as constituted by a form of representationally blind, motor-intentionality.     

Pragmatic,Existentialist and Phenomenological Interpretations of Marxism

In his book, Hermeneutics and Reflection (2013), Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann outlines what he sees as the fundamental differences between Edmund Husserl’s “theoretical” phenomenology and Martin Heidegger’s “a-theoretical” phenomenology, which he frames in terms of the distinction between “reflective observation” and “hermeneutic understanding”. In this paper, I will clarify the sense of these terms in order to elucidate some of the crucial similarities and differences between Husserl and Heidegger. Against von Herrmann’s characterization of the Husserlian project, I argue that we should not consider these differences in terms of “reflection”, since this runs the risk of misconstruing Husserlian phenomenology with the philosophical tradition he was striving against. Taken together, by way of a close reading of von Herrmann, the following discussion will serve as a brief sketch of the early Heidegger’s turn away from Husserlian phenomenology and toward his own hermeneutic phenomenology.