Philanthro
Closedness. Important in Being and Time. Belongs to the core of Heidegger’s existential analysis. It is designed to described the authentic being of the Dasein. Leaving the being as a being.
The opposite of closedness is manifestness as beings as being, as totality. And this is the very definition that Heidegger gives to the world. Heidegger is talking about this fundamental concept of the manifestness of beings as such in a peculiar manner. He is not adressing very directly, he is trying to follow a sideways path. This indirect path is important because in it is the spirit of the entire discussion of philosophical anthropology. This methodological detour is the concept of formal indication. This word appears in the title of of ¶70. This is one of the most notorious and essential words in Heideggers corpus. He uses the notion a lot without explaining it. It is essential because it is one of the most fundamental methods of anlysis for him. The formal indication is how the phenomenologists get to their goal.
Formaler Anzeigen. Whatever notions a philosopher may use, they are not using it in a well-defined way but it is like a pointer. All of these fundamental concepts are already formally indicating, that means not offering a strict definition. Heidegger’s concept here is the world. You can just kind of point to it without being able to circumsribe the entirety of a world. Just like with a horizon, it’s just some point far away which is difficult to entirely cover.
Death and nothingness. In the previous sessions Heidegger is coming back to the human being and uses the concept of the world-for-the-human. The second half of the book is a comparative approach to metaphysical concepts of the world. The initial question Heidegger asks is ’what is a world?’. Heidegger never offers a definition of the world, but offers only formal indications of it. He is trying to adress the concept of the world by form of comparison. Heidegger’s approach regarding the notion of the world is not saying what it is, but by explaining it in relation to a Dasein that has it, and forms it.
The closest thing that Heidegger offers us as a quasi-definition of the world, as the manifestness of being as totality. Manifestness of beings as such as a whole. What appears to be a definition is not really a definition, not in the same way as saying that the world is a sum of all beings. This definition has a very concrete appearance, and we know what all these terms mean.
Manifestness is not very exact. This is not offering us an answer but points us to the situation in which the world opens up.
Uppenbar = obvious
In Kant, three kind of essential faculties to the intellect: the senses, collects sense data; understanding, which applies our inbuilt logical framework onto the sense-data – whenever I see I see a bunch of data that is messy and my understanding then bounds it together and gives it a logical character; What is important for Kant is that those two faculties in themselves do not err. When my eyes see, my eyes do not make a mistake in themselves. My understanding can always make the right call when it comes to pure logic. There is something that errs and this is reason. Reason tends to exceed the boundaries of our senses and our understanding. If I am no longer satisfied with a concrete individual thing, but I want to make a judgement on the world, on something that is not empirically verifiable, I’ll try to apply my other categories onto this whole thing which I cannot perceive. For Kant, all judgements concerning what is ultimate and most universal, we have to make a transcendental illusion for ourselves; it transcends the concrete sensible things.
Kant is probably the most important enemy to Heidegger’s metaphysics. Because it is Kant that intends to cancel our dogmatic metaphysical thoughts of all those things that do not fall into understanding or senses, one such being the world. Heidegger is recognising the merit of his enemy whilst defending his own legitimacy as being able to talk about the world.
For Kant the illusion exists in the very illusion in trying to make a judgement in talking about the world. For Heidegger there is a more originary illusion. The person that makes the mistake is not the one that raises the judgement that the world begins in time, the one who makes a mistake is the one who asks for the world. It is the responder, who requires something present-at-hand. The world is not something that can be given present-at-hand, like a book or other individual things. It cannot be pointed out. The other illusion is the illusion of being able to treat the world like a thing. This is a kind of vulgar understanding in which we treat everything as a thing. If the phenomena of the world forbids us to the demand a concept from it, what alternative is?
Begriff, Vorgriff and Nachgriff. Fore-understanding consists in the primordial and every-day experience of having a previous implicit hermeneutical understanding of the thing before me. The Nachgriff is the after-understanding or the after-realisation of what is at hand.
What is important is that our knowledge of the world does not necessarily rely on the well-circumscribed definition of the world, but rather a fore-understanding of the world. Whenever we are dealing with people and things, we always have an implicit idea of what the world is, together with a horison that deals with all the things with which are dealing.
The world is no longer defined as some concrete and convenient connection of other beings but rather as an openness, which is always an openness for or to someone. This someone for whom it is open to is the one who has access to it, the world.
German romanticism: a phrase that fascinates many poets and philosophers: en kai pan; to on hei on. All the romantics are striving for is a situation in which all is in the one and one is in the all.
Heidegger wants to say that we are doing a science that breaks up all the different categories, but beings insofar as they are, in their totality. A science that studies being qua being. For Aristotle all beings have the similarity of being one, and not being something else.
Heidegger’s earlier book: Logic, the question of truth. From before B&T.
There is a hermeneutic as-structure, and an apophantic as-structure. In the hermeneutic structure the as is implicitly recognised as ready-at-hand. The apophantic as-structure is the logical term to attain the knowledge negatively, by recognising what as is not. When I use a chalk to write something and its function is negated, I look at the chalk and realise its nature – its whiteness, its softness etc.
Things are now more complicated because there is first a substance with a non-quality or usage, and which we attach a meaning to, like ’chalkness’. In other cases we have a tautology, I recognise x as x. In this case it is more complicated because no new information is gained. Even in this tautology something seems to open to me, I recognise this x as something with a certain quality that I need to care for etc. and that I can only use when I recognise it as the thing that it is. It is not some other toy-thing that I can play around with. The chalkness manifests to me.
What is peculiar about this openness is that it is not a random openness but an openness for the one that is going to use it. It is my issue to recognise the chalk as a chalk. Sometimes we ask the question ’who are you?’ and there are many ways to answer it. You can give some given identification. One can say, ontologically by attributing all these identifications to myself I conceal my real identity. These identifications are but roles. If we ask then the question more fundamentally, you are asking for the authentic self. Authentic, Eigentlich, is what is the self. Whenever I recognise something pertaining to myself I recognise its authenticity. Who are you as you? Your auth(or)enticity. He calls it also Jemeinlichkeit, always-mine-ness.
When we recognise the world as something that is open, we are recognising the task of transposing ourselves into this openness. The world recognised as a potential to open, ceases to be something a pure well-defined collection of all things external to myself. The task is to open ourselves to beings as being and as a whole.
Death in this formally indicative manner is not something that lies dormant or latent in our bodies. It is not something that medical sciences can help with. But rather some possibility, a fore-understanding of our finitude.
Death in everyday dasein is treated as something external, an external boundary, that does not orginarily belong to myself and which I fall victim to. By treating death as something present-at-hand like other things severs my originary relationship to it.
What is important is to understand what Heidegger means by the essence and power of the essential human acitivity, which is easily subject to misinterpretation. Our notion of the world as something openable, is always exposed to a misinterpretation. The other exmple of this essentially mistakeable human activity is what Heidegger does for a big part of the book. Whenever we try to understand the animal, as something poor in world, we show actually the fundamental human activity. We are trying to understand the stone and the animal by imposing our understanding of the world onto them. This necessarily will be critiqued by everyday dasein, by a scientific mind, which claims that you do not have access to the animal. You are only transposing your own dasein onto them. Heidegger says that in doing so, we precisely reach an understanding of the human. His philosophy of the animal is another of doing the same existential analysis. It is by looking at the animal that we can understand ourselves. It is always about Dasein’s self-relation to itself that Heidegger speaks. There is something heroic about this very metaphysical effort to say something unspeakable.