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PHILOSOPHICAL ANTHROPOLOGY 1.4

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PHILOSOPHICAL ANTHROPOLOGY 1.4
Figures:

  • Heidegger
  • Aristotle (Entelecheia)

Post Sein und Zeit:

  • metaphysics as an outcome of Dasein’s existence
  • humans are the METAPHYSICAL ANIMAL
  • later (1930s) he rejects metaphysics

World:

  • one aspect of existence’s unfolding
  • its one aspect of our existence we don’t control
  • we need a more consistent understanding of what a world is
  • Dasein’s horizon, towards which it projects itself
  • it is an existential binding force

Man:

  • striving to change modern man metaphysically and culturally
  • this is theory and practice

Fundemental Concepts of Metaphysics:

  • World in the center
  • Dasein must understand itself through something in the world, which changes the world
  • World-forming: the world is understood through the things you exist in the sake of
  • the world has different meanings with different self-understandings
  • beings being manifest as beings belongs to the World
  • the world is the accesability of beings
  • WE DONT HAVE ACCESS TO THE WORLD, THE WORLD IS WHAT GRANTS US ACCESS TO THINGS
  • openness and accessability
  1. Phenomenological analysis of boredom
  2. Analysis of Man/Animal openness
    Dasein problem - problem of world (openness) - Dasein discovery (man is world-forming)

Boredom:

  • like in anxiety, no access to individual beings
  • access to pure being, i.e. nothing-ness
  • we gain access to the background itself, the World which before gave us access to the things weve lost in boredom
  • this is the ontological framework into which we project our existences
  • this leads us to better understand being, which is always being-in-a-world

Animality:

  • poor in world
  • world-poverty, something which ought to be there isn’t
  • absence of world (the stone, meaningless to even question) vs poverty in world (the animal, worthy of questioning due to incompletion)
  • access to beings, but not beings as beings
  • no access to ontological structures (no fundamental boredom)
  • ORGANS: possibilities for actions (implies a certain telos, tending towards a goal)
  • a core of possibilities is at the core of all life
    [Kantian strain: grasping the principle/precondition for the emergence of possibilities]

Man/Animal:

  • points of contact and divide, despite fundamental differences
  • tools: made for something from the outside; organ: imminent capacity for, towards
  • The organ realizes its own end, which is the end of its existence

ENTELECHEIA:

  • having-the-end-in-itself (like the organ)
  • the end is not imposed externally like the tool
  • this is the Aristotelian soul, the immanent telos within life

[!!!] In the ORGANISM a CAPACITY comes first, which subserves the ORGAN to itself, to the capacity

  • first is the ontological principle of potentiality, the Kantian schema
  • then is the physical organ
  • the empirical (real) is there only because its potentiality came before
  • for a tool to be an organ it would need a possibility within itself (rather than outside of it; the hand holds the possibility for hammering, not the hammer)
  • TRANSCENDENTAL (for Kant): that which, being a priori, bestows possibility
  • if something occurs, then it must necessarily be possible
  • this means that nothing supernatural can happen (only that governed by a priori natural laws)
  • the animal invents the legal structure of nature it reproduces within itself and outside itself (the Umwelt it creates)
  • yet its closed within this legal structure
  • the animal’s openness is an openness to an Umring of its own creation
  • the human world, however, is essentialy open
  • the animal’s entrapment within its own structure means no access to beings as beings
  • we however can conceive that pure abstract X-chair
  • SEEING SOMETHING AS SOMETHING IS THE FUNDAMENT OF METAPHYSICS, THUS WE ARE THE METAPHYSICAL ANIMAL

The animal has a transcendental projection, but this projection is necessarily limited, in as much as it never gains access to beings as beings (thus, the animal is a closed life form)

With one arm we are within the World (background), with our other arm we are reach the figures in the foreground

  • a pincer movement: at once we grasp the totality of being, world-horizon, and also the here/now

THE AS:

  • beings AS beings
  • the groundwork for cognition, judgement, utterance, thought, language itself, even greetings
  • it later leads to freely determining things, changing perspectives, taking a neutral stance to things, generalizing into larger cateogries, METAPHYSICS and ontology
  • absolutely EVERYTHING, even when it is not something specific or determinate, is a SOMETHING (like a mysterious something in the dark, or an equally mysterious natural law…)
  • in BOREDOM there’s a pure AS-ness
  • the lack of beings as beings is what constitutes the animal’s poverty [man’s World is what animals ought to possess]

The animal is, in the end, inefficent in fuffiling a role only us humans can fuffil

  • its transcendality is purely embryonic
  • its oppennes is in the end a kind of closed-ness (the ring)
  • he accepts the traditional definition of man as a metaphysical animal (thus the animal lacks that metaphysical aspect which makes us special)

Man’s fundemental traits [which ammount to the same thing]:

  • the AS
  • transcendence
  • world-projection

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