Page numbers in these notes refer to those on the margin of Martin Heidegger, Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962) and its reprints. These page numbers on the margin correspond to the German original published by Max Niemeyer Verlag (Tübingen) and Band 2 of the Heidegger Gesamtausgabe published by Vittorio Klostermann Verlag (Frankfurt).
Being and Time is abbreviated as SZ in these notes.
Introduction (pp. 19-64; §§ 1-8)
Wednesday, 30 September 2015 (notes by Marton Ribary)
The language of SZ
Heidegger creates an idiosyncratic language in SZ which deliberately deviates from the standard philosophical vocabulary. Loaded nominal constructions, neologisms and etymologically sensitive reinterpretations of everyday words create a German which is hardly recognisable for the native speaker, and poses an almost insurmountable challenge for the translators. Philosophy, which is understood by Heidegger as “universal phenomenological ontology” starting with “the hermeneutic of Dasein” (38), “lack[s] not only most of the words but, above all, the ‘grammar’”. (39)
Members of our group read SZ in the German original as well as in English, Italian, Spanish, Polish and Hungarian. The translations sometimes make Heidegger’s German even more obscure by covering etymological references, or by reintroducing traditional philosophical language which Heidegger wanted to avoid. For the former, an example is the Italian ‘l’essere’ which fails to mirror the grammatical form (verbal noun) and the added meaning of “presence” encoded in the German “Dasein”. For the latter, an example is the English “entity” which reintroduces a scholastic term as the translation of the present participle “das Seiende” which literally means “that which is”. Macquarrie and Robinson draw attention to this choice of word in their very first footnote of the book (3). Readers of SZ in any language need to remain alert to terminological problems, something which our multilingual reading group promises to highligh during the year.
Dasein
Our discussion departed from the concept of Dasein which is left untranslated in Macquarrie-Robinson, while other translations struggled to reproduce it in any meaningful way. For example, the Hungarian term “jelenvalólét” is an almost nonsensical neologism which literally means “the being which is present”.
In Heidegger’s definition, “this entity which each of us is himself and which includes inquiring as one of the possibilities of its Being, we shall denote by the term ‘Dasein’” – “Dieses Seiende, das wir selbst je sind und das unter anderem die Seinsmöglichkeit das Fragens hat, fassen wir terminologisch als Dasein.” (7) The Dasein only happens to be the human being, because we, who embark on the inquiry targeting the meaning of Being, happen to be humans. Potentially, Dasein could denote God, a Martian or any other entity (Seiende) which reflects on its own possibilities of Being (Seinsmöglichkeit). However, the phenomenological method which Heidegger employs allow no other entry to the inquiry than through the entities who are the inquirers themselves. It is only because of the human perspective of the inquirer that Dasein effectively denotes the human existence in SZ, but this is purely accidental.
The deconstruction of the philosophical tradition
Heidegger criticises the philosophical tradition which has eliminated Dasein, the entity reflecting on its own Being. Heidegger notes this line of inquiry in the fragments of Parmenides, but he notices that they start to sink into oblivion already in Plato. The metaphysical framework of Aristotle (Categories) which offered a solid description of “things” has dominated philosophy and the sciences, and the supposed metaphysical innovations of Descartes and Kant did not manage to break away from the perspective of “things”. The “what … which pertains to a subject-matter” (eines sachhaltigen Was) (12) cannot be applied to an entity the Being of which surpasses the “what-like” Being of mere things. The metaphysical tradition, according to Heidegger, needs a radical turn: an existential metaphysics from the perspective of Dasein needs to be developed which will be able to encompass the more restricted perspective of the metaphysics of things. (Please note that this is MR’s interpretation of the SZ’s main objective.)
Things and Dasein – ontic and ontological
Dasein is distinguished among the entities by the very fact that it reflects on its own Being, that “in its very Being, that Being is an issue”. (12) The non-reflective “things” and the reflective Dasein are both entities (τὰ ὂντα - ta onta), but the peculiar reflective position grants Dasein an ontic priority. On the one hand, the log of wood cannot reflect on its own Being, neither understands itself in terms of remaining a log of wood, or becoming a table. On the other hand, Dasein cannot avoid making its own Being an “issue” for itself, because either by choosing to become something other than it currently is, or by neglecting to make any decision, it acts towards its own Being one way or another. Heidegger’s positions seems to be a radical reformulation of Aristotle’s metaphysical distinction of potentiality and actuality from the perspective of Dasein (MR). In Aristotle, the entity which is a log of wood in actual terms is potentially a table – that potentiality is part of that particular entity’s metaphysical profile. Similarly, in Heidegger, the Dasein holds an actual and potential Being with one crucial difference, namely that unlike the log of wood, Dasein reflects upon and acts towards its potential forms of Being. “Dasein always understands itself in terms of its existence – in terms of a possibility of itself: to be itself or not itself.” (12) The ontical inquiry is concerned about the metaphysical structure of entities (τὰ ὂντα - ta onta), the ontological inquiry asks the more primordial question of what it means to be.
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