Over the last few days I have been racking my memory for impressive and significant Heidegger bits that will reveal my man's clairvoyance and depth. During bits of free time I pored over Being and Time, and What is called Thinking, and Steiner's Martin Heidegger, looking for quotable quotes. While I found no pithy one-liner (fortunately), I felt once again, a decade later, the sudden clearing of thought and organic understanding that I rarely obtain elsewhere.
On further reflection, I feel perhaps this in itself is an example of Heidegger's project. That the issue of our relation to the world, to reality, to ways of existence, is something that is itself central to certain traditions. I am reminded of some of the central themes of Hinduism, its "fixation" with and return to being within the world (as opposed to the flight represented by Buddhism, as I see it)... I think back at my own naive and silly smugness in my attempts (or listening appreciatively to) analytical/reductionist dismissals of some poor elder's readings of something like say the Upanishads.
I did find a good passage (with quotes) in Steiner which conveys some of what I think Heidegger contributed to thought:
====== From Steiner ======
Dasein is "to be there" and "there" is the world: the concrete, literal, actual, daily world. To be human is to be immersed, implanted, rooted in the earth, in the quotidian matter-of-factness of the world. A philosophy that abstracts, that seeks to elevate itself above the everydayness of the everyday, is empty. ... The world *is* -- a fact that is, of course, the primal wonder and source of all ontological asking. It is here and now and everywhere around us. We are in it. Totally. ... In-Sein, this "being in", is not the accidental location of water in a glass, of a table in a room. Applied to man's Dasein, it is the total determinant of his "being-at-all". There is nothing spiritual or metaphorical about this. ....
Heidegger's "mundanity", to use this eroded word in its strongest etymological sense, would overthrow the whole metaphysical mind-body tandem and the dissociation between essential being and being here-and-now. For Heidegger, being-in is not an attribute, it is not an accidental property of extension, as it would be in the Aristotelian idiom:
== quote ==
It is not the case that man "is" and then has, by way of an extra, a relationship-of-being toward the "world" -- a world with which he provides himself occasionally. Dasein is never "proximally" an entity which is, so to speak, free from Being-in, but which sometimes has the inclination to take up a "relationship" toward the world. Taking up relationships toward the world is possible only because Dasein, as Being-in-the-world, is as it is. This state of Being does not arise just because some other entity is present-at-hand outside of Dasein and meets up with it. Such an entity can "meet up with" Dasein only insofar as it can, of its own accord, show itself within a world.
== end quote ==
Heidegger is saying that the notion of existential identity and that of world are completely wedded. To be at all is to be worldly [Ref., here in particular, but in general, to my preface on Hinduism]. The everyday is the enveloping wholeness of being. .... We overlook the all-determining centrality of our being-in-the-world because the everyday actualities of this inhabiting are so various and seemingly baal. They consist, says Heidegger, of having to do with something, producing something, attending to and looking after something, making use of something, giving up something and letting it go, undertaking, accomplishing, evincing, interrogating, considering, discussing, determining, and knowing something. This last way of being-in-the-world is especially noteworthy.
Knowing, affirms Heidegger, ... is "a mode of being of Dasein as being-in-the-world". Knowing is a kind of being. Knowledge is not some mysterious leap from subject to object and back again. "The perceiving of what is known is not a process of returning with one's booty to the 'cabinet' of consciousness" (observe how Heidegger fixes on the aggressive, exploitative strain in the classical model of the acquisition of knowledge).
[MY EMPHASIS]
It is, on the contrary, a form of being-with, a **concern** with and inside the world.
[END EMPHASIS]
Where no production, manipulation, or putting to profitable use is intended, such concern is a "tarrying alongside".... Disinterestedness is, therefore, the highest mode of concern. ....
... the Cartesian cogito ergo sum is a piece of anthropomorphic and rationalistic hyperbole. The reverse is the case: "I am, therefore I think". Existence is the necessary precedent and enabling condition of thought. There is, certainly in the very sense in which Descartes sought to establish the two terms, existence before thought. ...
[below I get into sections that relate to my recounting my wife's delight with Heidegger's thought on doing things, interacting with the world, which I described as a -- regular use, not Heidegger use -- authentic, ref: David Attenborough]
Vorhandenheit, which signifies "presentness-at-hand", is the character of the object "out there". It characterizes the matter of theoretic speculation, of scientific study. Thus "Nature" is vorhanden to the physicist and rocks are vorhanden to the geologist. But this is not how a stonemason or a sculptor meets up with a rock. His relationship to stone, the relationship crucial to his Dasein, is that of Zuhandenheit, of a "readiness-to-hand". That which is zuhanden, literally "to-hand", reveals itself to Dasein, is taken up by and into Dasein, in ways absolutely constitutive of the "thereness" into which our existence has been thrown and in which it must accomplish its being. ...
Appropriate use, performance, manual action possess their own kind of sight. Heidegger names it "circumspection". Any artist, any craftsman, any sportsman wielding the instruments of his passion will know exactly what Heidegger means and will know how often the trained hand "sees" quicker and more delicately than eye and brain. Theoretical vision, on the other hand, looks at or upon things noncircumspectively: "It constructs a canon for itself in the form of *method*". This is the way of the physicist "looking" at atomic particles. Here methodological abstraction replaces the immediate authority of "readiness-to-hand". Heidegger's differentiation is not only eloquent in itself; it brilliantly inverts the Platonic order of values which sets the theoretical contemplator high above the artist, the craftsman, the manual worker.
To speak of work tools is, necessarily, to infer the existence of "others", of those for whom the work is destined. ... The "I" is never alone in its experience of dasein. When "others" are met with, it is not the case that "one's subject is proximally present-at-hand". We encounter others "from out of the world, in which concernfully circumspective Dasein essentially dwells". The meeting with others is not a contingent, ancillary attribute of subjectivity; it is an essential, integral element in the reciprocal realizations of being and of world. ...
The world into which our Dasein is thrown and on which it enters has others in it. ... Our understanding of the ontological status of others, and of the relationship of such status to our own Dasein, is itself a form of being. To understand the presentness of others is to exist. Being-in-the-world, says Heidegger, is a being-with.
====== End Steiner ======
This leads beautifully into Paul Feyerabend's critique of Method and his emphasis of diversity of the factual world in The Conquest of Abundance.
Hmm... if I wasn't such a manly man, I would be weeping at the beauty of it, right now! ;-) But I bet old Jerry is going to be tearing it all apart in a minute! ;-)
--ravi
-- Support something better than yourself: ;-) PeTA: http://www.peta.org/ GreenPeace: http://www.greenpeace.org/