Division II, baby

Ohh yeah... get ready for it: Classes start soon at Berkeley, and Hubert Dreyfus' lectures on Division II of Being and Time are going to be downloadable.

They're amazing lectures, and a really great way to begin to learn what Heidegger is talking about. It's interesting: you see that many people are critical of Dreyfus for being too pragmatist, leaning too much on Division I and not pursuing paths, very much present in Being and Time, that open up so easily into his later work--all this you hear, but I think Dreyfus' interpretations have held up for so long despite the changes in Heidegger scholarship over the years because he has a real sense of what he continually refers to as "the phenomenon:" Dreyfus thinks extremely hard about the sort of happening, the sort of taking place, the phenomenology that Heidegger is doing when he is doing phenomenological ontology and that can be overlooked quite easily, because he just has so much to say about ontology! This doesn't mean Dreyfus interprets Heidegger like he is Husserl or something, or even like Merleau-Ponty... it just means that he gives you such a solid foundation from which you can either take off from or ground yourself within in order to deal with Heidegger, because he gives you a vivid sense of the moment of the phenomenon taking place--the point of its withdrawal. You really see that this aspect of what Heidegger is doing is almost indispensable for some of his larger claims: the interpretation of time as futural must show up in worldhood somehow, and show up in a definite phenomenon that we can sort of see every day... this "must," this necessity, is the mark of Dreyfus' rigor--getting you to see it like this is his job, and he does it wonderfully. I think that one thing that he said during last semester's course is absolutely true: that in this sense Division I is more expansive and anything said in Division II. Whether Dreyfus thinks this is because Division II is less worked out and a more rough draft than Division I, or because it constitutes less of an interpretation and working out of Aristotle, or anything else, I think that this claim remains legitimate if only because you can see how much mileage Dreyfus himself is able to make of it. That is (sorry for these fragmented comments, they'll have to do for now, given that I'm traveling a lot and writing papers), I think Division I is more expansive because it is making a claim about the merits of ontology in its exposition that is unprecedented and sets the tone, so to speak, for anything that could follow from it. More than the courses, or even the Contributions to Philosophy, the first division of Being and Time is such a sustained effort of an argument about ontology that it colors everything that will follow. It is the struggle with the attempt to think beyond or before "values" or "experiences" and to bring them back to a "how," a reason or a structure that runs deeper than any particular way you can specify that structure--any "what." It is that amazingly creative leap Heidegger makes away from Husserl and back towards Aristotle, that one can see in his early lecture notes.