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.

Ignorance and irony

I hope soon to write something on what Heidegger means by "authenticity" in Being and Time and elsewhere. But for now I can at least give an example of how badly the word is misinterpreted in the United States.
First of all, just note that the translation of eigentlich by "authenticity" is by no means a standard translation. Here is a list of words that eigentlich can translate as: "intrinsic," "really," and, perhaps the best, "underlying," are also available. "Authentic" has such a specific connotation in English that it actually is one of the words that is farthest from the German in the way Heidegger uses it.
For "authentic" means something like "proper" to us. Now, witness my example (here is the mp3 of it) of what a mess you get yourself into when you interpret the word this way. It is an interview with the pretentious Robert Harrison, who thinks he knows his Heidegger and who also thinks he is smart enough to get the better of a incisive, rigorous Heideggerian like Andrew Mitchell. Harrison is a postmodernist, and, as such, is led naturally by many of the reflections of Derrida to a critique of all that is "proper." So naturally when he sees "authentic," in the Robinson and Macquarrie translation of Being and Time, he has to criticize it as implying some type of unfounded "moral" message, i.e. favoring one element in a binary as more "proper" than the other, turning an opposition into a heirarchy because, as Derrida continually emphasized, there can be no binary where the terms of it are indifferent to each other. Notice how Mitchell corrects him and says that there is no real connection between the German eigentlich and the proper. And observe how Harrison believes that because he is a Heideggerian, Mitchell is merely subscribing to the definitions of the proper that Heidegger erected in his work.
Now, I'm not agreeing with any Heideggerians in denying that the word "authentic" does not carry a moral message of some sort, as Harrison accuses Mitchell of doing: I'm not showing Harrison to be an idiot because he doesn't know a "real" reading of Heidegger. I'm merely showing that Harrison could never know Heidegger at all. This is because he cannot see how his own critique of the proper is bound up in a Derridian viewpoint that is based on an elaboration of Heidegger's ideas. That is, he does not see that the Derrida he spouts so righteously was perhaps one of the best readers of Heidegger ever, and how he developed his critique of the proper precisely out of the critique of Being as the present that Heidegger developed in that very work Harrison criticizes, Being and Time. As long as he remains ignorant to Derrida's connections to Heidegger and how Heidegger's term eigentlich makes possible a critique of Being as presence or (what is the same thing) Being as the proper, the stable, the substantive, the non-becoming--as long as he remains ignorant to this, he will, like many, many people in America, remain unfit for any genuine encounter with Heidegger at all, let alone a criticism of his use of the word eigentlich. In other words, like many in the United States academy, it is the mere appearance of the word (and, remember, a word that appears as the badly translated "authentic") that provokes a critique of Heidegger's reliance on Being as the proper, and keeps one ironically ignorant to the fact that Heidegger, through his integration of his readings of Nietzsche, Hegel, and the Greeks in Being and Time, made possible this interpretation of Being as the proper. Of course, this type of academic will say (and I should say it is only a type of academic--I'm not saying all or most or even a little amount of academics in America are of this type), there remains a reason why the text exists as such with its translation of eigentlich as authenticity--there is some connection between the German term and the idea of the "proper." And indeed this is so: Derrida in his criticisms of Heidegger gets at how this is not a mistake, how Heidegger himself succumbs to the history of Being as presence and the proper that he would like to critique. But Derrida shows this necessity of a connection between the German term and the idea of the proper, so nicely brought out by the term "authentic," by resisting merely pointing it out, that is, by reading Heidegger. By "reading" I mean that he sees that this bad translation is indeed bad, is indeed a poor relation of the sense of the German that Heidegger writes. This labor and the joy of reading is what is refused by merely pointing at the connection between eigentlich and the moral, the proper: the depth of what Derrida does with Heidegger, and what Heidegger himself makes available (namely, the critique of Being as the proper, as presence), is completely lost in this banal, easily and perversely fashioned link between the two.

The ontological and the ontic

Here is a handy way to grasp what Heidegger means by specifying something as "ontological" instead of "ontic." Essentially, you reckon with the ontic, you understand the ontological: the ontic is something adequately grasped by something like counting, while the ontological is something grasped only adequately when it is seen and participated in as significant.
When someone sees something recur many times and points it out repeatedly, we complain to her or him sometimes by saying sarcastically, "geez, are you counting?" For example, say I am talking, and I keep unintentionally saying the word "like:" "so I was like, at the store and like, totally like saw this dude there that like looked like, like, Josh, man." My listener interrupts my discourse with the following: "dude, you said "like," like 50 times there." I would find this comment annoying and inappropriate to the matter at hand--what I'm trying to get across is my encounter with this guy who looked like Josh, not how many times I said "like." So I'd say back to him sarcastically, "dude--are you like counting how many times I say 'like'?" It makes him seem obsessive and unable to grasp the import of what I'm getting at because he's focused on some trivial thing. Another, perhaps better example (which comes c/o watching the Yankees game in my apartment in the Village tonight): say I'm at a baseball game with some friends, and I keep noticing that Derek Jeter keeps scratching his leg when he comes up to the plate. I say something like, "He's doing it again!" each time he comes up to bat, and finally all my friends get annoyed and yell at me "dude, are you like, counting?" In essence, what has happened is that I have focused on something that diminishes the essence of whatever is occuring or existing then in the game by drawing attention away from it and towards some minor event.
This chastizing, sarcastic phrase, "are you counting or something?" functions to call us away from the ontic and towards the ontological. The ontic was the phenomenon that was countable or rather reckon-able--the "like," and the scratching of the leg. In other words, it was what had such little significance that it could be grasped by merely marking its simply occuring--by saying "dude you said 'like' like 50 times" or by just saying "it's happening again!" In short, it was a discrete, contained event that cut itself off from the significance of the conversation and the game--this is why the phrase "are you counting!?" is so apt. There is a mode of interpretation of the event that indeed thinks that it adequately grasps the particular event by merely counting it, by limiting significance down to individual elements that make up the whole of significance. The ontological is that significance without any differentiation into things like elements--in the examples, it is the making of the point in the conversation and the importance of the particular at bat in which Jeets scratches his leg. I limit down this importance--to use the second example--by focusing on the leg, by treating the importance of the at-bat as something that can be localized into a small area of significance. I get called back by the sarcastic remark from my friends to an event that is not merely adequately grasped by counting or reckoning with it, but by understanding it, by interpreting it and letting myself be free for interpretation in various ways. The ontological is something that gets understood in a larger sense by me taking up whatever is going on and giving meaning to it: in the at bat, I certainly don't "understand" it by remarking "he's doing it again!" but by participating in the event, by being a spectator watching the game. For my friend who is listening to me, he understands me by making my point mean something for him as he is listening to me--not by pointing out that I say "like" a lot. For my friends at the game--to conclude with this example--I am hopelessly lost however if I continue to talk about the leg-scratching: I cannot see what they see, the larger significance of the game that makes them a fan and a fan of Jeter. This is the "ontological difference," a phrase often used to describe Heidegger's distinction between the ontic and the ontological. On either side of this difference, there is a different way of grasping what is going on.
One last remark, using the baseball example: we indeed do have people who just reckon with statistics: they are announcers and bookkeepers and in fact enhance the significance of the game for the fans through their ontical understanding, by their reducing the overall significance of the game into little elements. Thus the ontic can enrich the ontological understanding of something. But it would be sad if all the significance of a game were reduced down to statistics merely--this lament is one that is said from an grasping or understanding of the game that is ontological and not ontic, that sees it as something that has significance that is taken over and reinterpreted by anyone who views it ontologically.

A bit of a technical post-script is in order, however--and this is just a post-script, by the way, unessential to the above part. Just because you "count" or reckon with the ontic, and understand the "significance" of the ontological, doesn't mean that the ontic is what is merely quantitative and the ontological merely qualitative. Nor does it mean that the ontic is something determinate and the ontological indeterminate. For even when we say that the ontic might be what is quantative we are already attributing a quality to it: the quality of being able to be only conceived quantitatively. So too do we attribute quantity to the qualitative in calling it merely qualitative: it has a singular quantity as opposed to a multiplicity--it is one whereas the quantiative proper is supposedly many. What characterizes the ontic and the ontological is not quantity or quality but significance--in technical terms, the "kind of Being" of things that fall into each category. The ontic has essentially a different type of significance than the significance of the ontological: it is a significance that is adequately grasped in reckoning or counting. The ontological, however, only has a signficance that can be grasped insofar as we grasp it in terms of significance. This is why it is more "primordial" than the ontic--that is not because it is "qualitative" or "indeterminate," murky and obscure in its profundity, but because it is the significance of something explicitly taken as significance. To just hint at what this means, we might say that it requires a shift in the way we conceive of truth. The truth of the ontological is not conceived in terms of how correct something is to how it is represented, because if we are not within the sphere of the ontic, the representation of the thing and the thing itself are both taken in terms of significance. Rather, the truth is in how profoundly as significance the significance of something constitutes itself. Its truth is in terms of how profoundly it reveals itself to be part of its essence as existent, or, rather, in terms of how it discloses its Being.