Wednesday, August 15, 2007

The "world" rightly conceived

Here is a good quote showing how Heidegger's world must be conceived within the realm of the traditional metaphysical dichotomies of inner-outer, subject-object, mind-body, etc. This way of conceiving it is as a paradox. In other words, Heidegger's definition of the world will appear to traditional metaphysics as paradoxical. But the paradox itself outlines an avenue of inquiry, not to resolve the paradoxes within the traditional metaphysical framework, but to explore a definition of a world that would make them coherent but would at the same time destroy this framework. Here is the quote--and it must be remembered that Heidegger is using the Kantian sense of "transcendent" (i.e. "x is transcendent" means x is a condition that always exists prior to any particular thing that could be brought about to exhibit x: x determines always what comes after it or inside it):

The world is, as it were, already "further outside" than any object can ever be. The "problem of transcendence" cannot be brought round to the question of how a subject comes out to an object, where the aggregate of objects is identified with the idea of the world. Raher we must ask: what makes it ontologically possible for beings to be encountered [as] within-the-world and objectified as so encountered?
...If the "subject" gets conceived ontologically as an existing Dasein whose Being is grounded in temporality [i.e if it is conceived rightly], then one must say that the world is "subjective." But in that case, this "subjective" world, as one that is temporally transcendent, is "more objective" than any possible object.

-Being and Time, II, ¶ 69c, 416.

The last sentence contains the paradox. A world rightly conceived for Heidegger is a world that is more objective in its objectivity than any object, and only thereby is subjective.

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