--- joanna <123hop at comcast.net> wrote:
Reading it
> over though I have to ask what I always ask: What is
> the essential
> difference between what Heidegger asserts about
> dasein and what any
> 'enlightened" speaker would say on the same subject,
> take for example,
> Krishnamurti.
Krishnamurti wrote about the world being composed of meaningful use-relationships between beings defined according to how they relate to a temporal human project? I've never read him, but I tend to doubt it.
being in the
> historical (man made) world is different from being
> in nature and to
> become enlightened by "being in the world" in any
> kind of socially
> useful way means being able to look at that
> difference, to understand
> it, to understand how our historic/cultural
> happenstance textures our
> conditioning and our perception.
"Being-in-the-world" is not a means to achieve enlightenment and it is not a state. It is a description of the prosaic world human beings inhabit every second of their lives (well, when they're awake anyway). All it means is that every being I encounter is understood by me in terms of a context that relates ultimately to me and whatever practical, theoretical, or life project I currently find myself. For instance, I am currently encountering the computer as "a thing to write an email to Joanna on the LBO-Talk list with," which is part of larger projects of, on the one hand, continuing a discussion about Heidegger and, on the other, my project of making my way to the bar after work, stopping briefly at the Internet cafe, both of which are parts of larger projects (the biggest project that encompasses all the others being the one pointing at my death, BTW). The next person to use this computer may be experiencing it as "a thing to play Doom III" on. Note that neither of us are expoeriencing the computer as "a machine that processes information" unless we drop out of the practical mode and explicitly thematize that aspect of the computer -- as a computer scientist may do professionally, for example. A Neanderthal somehow encountering it as a computer would never encounter it as any of these things: it might be "a weird-looking thing on the weird-looking log-like thing," or "a thing to bash that charging bear on the head with," or maybe "
Similarly, until I explicitly thought about it just now to use it as an example, I was not encountering the street outside the Internet cafe at all. When I leave the cafe, I will experience it as "the thing I just used as an example" and "the thing that leads to the metro." The Moldovan migrant workers outside, however, are probably currently encountering it is as "a thing that it is a real pain in the ass to replace the cobblestones in" in their current project of digging it up. Presumably this is embedded in larger projects of working as immigrant laborers in a foreign country, which is embedded in a still larger project of having to feed their families in Moldova. See what I mean?
Nu, zayats, pogodi!
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