[lbo-talk] Grappling with Heidegger

Charles Brown cbrown at michiganlegal.org
Mon Jun 12 07:54:25 PDT 2006


Ravi:

At around 9/6/06 5:34 pm, Charles Brown wrote:
>
> If I understand, Heidegger is talking about an ahistorical , asocial>
Individual, a Universal Individual, rooted in itself.
>

Is this what you get from the text I quoted? Here's one bit:


> 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.

We must be parsing this stuff very differently, I am afraid.

--ravi

^^^^^^^

CB: No, more from what Chris said here, emphasizing the "first-person point of view." Do you disagree that Heidegger emphasizes the first-person point of view ?

Chris D: Well, Heidegger and strutuaraliism certainly do intersect, and I think it's not an accident that post-Heideggerians like Derrida attacked Levi-Straus. But anyway phenomenology is an analysis of experience as lived by a person. It is an analysis of the first-person point of view. Talk about "societies" and so forth is meaningless to phenomenology, except insofar as it relates to the first person. Just as physics and chemistry are meaningless from the phen. point of view, except insofar as it relates to the first person experience. Heidegger is trying to describe the structure of human experience in general, regardless of whether the human in question is Karl Marx, me, Charles Brown, Adam Smith, Adolph Hitler, Stalin, Ghandi, my third-grade teacher, a third-century Roman, or a neanderthal. Basically he's trying to eludicate what it means to be a "first person," describing the world as it appears to an individual, or rather describing the general structure of the world as experienced by an individual.



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