Date: Wed Sep 13 09:10:36 1995
From: Tom Blancato <tblancato-AT-envirolink.org>
Subject: Re: Susan Says Here It Is, There It Isn't



It could, but it could also be read as a phenomenology of worldhood misapplied 
to personhood. Heidegger's main worlding structures are developed out of the 
"workshop" example. His basic psychology is that of fear, which he maintains 
has the same structures as the other emotions. HIs primary objects are things 
in the world, his starting point the obsession with things present at hand. He 
negatively uses this as his starting point. He does not open vast ranges of 
interpersonal experience. His later writings attest to this as well. That a 
self gets constituted in this does not mean that his thinking is never the 
less based on a predominatly people-less phenomenology. At best, he can pine 
for  "the table where the boys were", in a now empty room, but can not look 
the boy in the face and develop his ontology there. Example after example, 
things are used as the royal road to the self, be it peasant shoes or solitary 
wanderers.

As a result, when his world is peopled, its phenomenology, it's ontology and 
sociality is structured in the most simple ways: simple solicitude, guilt, 
dasein finds its heros, etc. The workshop version of a world.

Where are there mothers? fathers? friends? siblings? lovers? Sexual 
differences? Opening these as the primary worlding moments, exploring these as 
the first moments for understanding the basic constitution of the self,  using 
these as forms by which to generalize about the worldhoold of the world, the 
structires of significance, the temporality of the self, being towards death,  
etc., would vastly disrupt Heidegger's commitments to certain 
political/transcendntal forms of being with. His ealry acceptance of Nazism 
betrays a profound, and very, very deep naivete in this regard.

Yet one could say as you have that his is such a phenomenology of personhood, 
which I think is quite true: it is profoundly corrupt, truncated. But it is a 
personhood. A personhood, with out people. And yet, we know, the people are 
there. The structure of being there, with this corruption borne in mind, is an 
avenue for discovering a lot of things.





Erik D Lindberg writes:
>On Tue, 12 Sep 1995, Tom Blancato wrote:
>
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> No people.
>> 
>No people in _Being and Time_?  It could be read as an existential 
>phenomenology of "personhood."
>
>> 
>> douglas edric stanley writes:
>> >What's wrong with Heidegger?
>> >
>> 
>> ---
>> There is no path to peace. Peace is the path.
>> 
>> Tom Blancato
>> tblancato-AT-envirolink.org
>> Eyes on Violence (nonviolence and human rights monitoring in Haiti)
>> Thoughtaction Collective (reparative justice project)
>> 
>> 
>> 
>
>Erik D. Lindberg
>Dept. of English and Comparative Lit.
>University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
>Milwaukee, WI  53211
>email: edl-AT-csd.uwm.edu

---
There is no path to peace. Peace is the path.

Tom Blancato
tblancato-AT-envirolink.org
Eyes on Violence (nonviolence and human rights monitoring in Haiti)
Thoughtaction Collective (reparative justice project)



     ------------------