[lbo-talk] Grappling with Heidegger

[Chris Doss]

Yeah, he's trying to search for an Aristotelian
"horizon" against which a thing becomes a specific
entity because it is NOT that horizon, or rather what
stands beyond it. (It's hard to express because H is
talking about a thing being a specific entity in _it's
own active self-understanding_, not in the sense of a
static external definition. The only thing "outside"
the locus of existence that is the particular human
being and its world is the time that came before its
existence and the time that will come after. One could
argue with Sartre and Levinas that other loci of
existence (i.e. other people, possibly animals, H was
sketchy on animals) or God fall into this category
too. That's why death is such a big deal, more so than
birth because Dasein's self- and world-understandings
are futurally directed. Arendt wrote about this in her
dissertation, using Augustine as a placeholder for
Heidegger (I think).

The whole thing really is a brilliant merging of
Aristotle, Kant and Husserl. Damn, time to go back and
reread Sein und Zeit!

--- andie nachgeborenen
<andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com> wrote:
I really take H's the main point about death, to put
it in plain English, to be that the fact of our
mortality is the central issue in the life of a human
being -- not merely something one has to come to terms
with and learn to accept,a s it were, philosophically,
as the Stoics taught, or as a gateway to heaven or
hell, as Christian dogma, but as the fundamental
structuring fact about the lives of mortal beings that
influences, or ought to influence, everything in our
lives.

Nu, zayats, pogodi!

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