Wednesday, September 19, 2007
Early Heidegger
A great place to start with Heidegger that I recommend to absolutely everyone is in his Phenomenology of Religious Life, the short (all in all it is 7 pages or so) sections on "Factical Life Experience as the Point of Departure" and "Taking-Cognizance-of." Here Heidegger essentially outlines, in the Winter Semester of 1920-21, what would later become his conception of the "world" in Being and Time, not in a rigorous way (as these issues are pursued in Ontology: the Hermeneutics of Facticity), but in an accessible, surprisingly easy manner. One can also see Heidegger's conception of the world stemming out of the teaching (not publications) of Husserl and his interest in the "life-world." All in all, before anyone tackles Being and Time it is probably good to go here for clarification and orientation to Heidegger's overall view.
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2 comments:
What a helpful suggestion. Thank you so much for referring me to these sections. (I know this post is a bit old, bear with me.) I'm a Heidegger beginner, so I find myself stuck in the incorrect characterizations of Being as some/thing/, an entity, and of Dasein as some /property/ of the self rather than the "self-world" conceptions given here. It's so difficult for the analytically-trained philosophical mind to get past this. These passages really show quite clearly how Heidegger meant Dasein to function relative to the world and how it goes "earlier" than epistemological and "ontological" questions to the "pre-ontological" in that my Dasein and the world can't be extricated from one another (if I'm understanding it right, of course).
Long-winded way of saying thanks.
Thanks so much!
I am analytically trained too, and I always found it (and still find it) tough to deal with some of the ways things get put, both by people on the analytic side and those on the continental side. I found a literary training helps when reading Heidegger: you're constantly looking for how the concepts function (much as you would look at how metaphors are working in a poem) rather than what they signify (because in Heidegger they are mostly innacurate or jargon, and a lot of the mistakes Continental people get into is in thinking these things are clearly referential, in that they fit into some system that gives them all the meaning they should have), which (i.e. looking at function) generally is (or maybe is, I'm just guessing) what the analytic approach is good at. At the same time, you have to tolerate a level of indistinctness here, which Continental people seem better at. I'd say the best, very simple intro (not by Heidegger) to some aspects of Heidegger that is out there (i.e. what being means) is Johnathan Lear in his amazing book Radical Hope--it proceeds with Lear's typical knack for balancing Anglo- and Continental approaches, and also demonstrates (I think) a nice way of thinking which might serve as a model for working in both areas. But it's not as specific as this stuff--and you're obviously starting to get real deep into Heidegger!
But thank you so much!
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