Date: Sun, 11 Aug 1996 14:04:11 -0400 From: paul.murphy-AT-utoronto.ca (Paul Murphy) Subject: Dasein's guilt / debt Tom Blancato asks about the status of Schuldigsein in SZ, in the context of placing 'blame' in the history of Being (a topic developing out of the interpretation of Seinsvergessenheit and the 'centre-stage' of man). Perhaps some clarification of this 'category' of Dasein's being -- Being-guilty in the McQuarrie / Robinson translation -- could spur thinking along. As I understand 'guilt' in SZ (and the attendent category of responsibility), Heidegger is placing Dasein's finitude within an existential context. Finitude is interpreted traditionally according to various binarisms, deriving perhaps from the Phaedo account of the (in-finite) soul imprisoned in the body; shuffling off this mortal coil enables the soul to take flight into the realm of the supersensuous idea. Heidegger spurns this model as predicated upon a metaphysical account of human being, reducing the existential 'who' to the ontic 'what' -- akin to asserting the cogito without enquiring into the sense of 'sum'. Schuldigsein pertains to the finitude of the throw, of having always already been thrown into the world, in-sisting within a given horizon of interpretation. The deployment of the term 'guilt' suggests a certain moralistic interpretation (together with Verfallen, leading to the wide-spread notion that Heidegger is transplanting Christian theology into existential analytic). I suggest we take seriously the ambiguity of the German 'Schuld', which means 'debt' as well as 'guilt'. In arriving in the world without having 'chosen' it, in being thrown into a situation, a historically determined life-world, prior to any individual decision about such a world, finite Dasein is indebted. Such a debt must be understood economically rather than simply moralistically -- I know, economics and morality are closely intertwined, as Nietzsche would be the first to point out ... still, let's use this distinction heuristically for the time being. >From this economic understanding of Dasein's finitude develops the thematics of gift and gratitude, of granting or favouring and of the thinking that thanks. Responsibility would be a function of thinking-thanking, inasmuch as responding to the gift -- the call, the sending, the disclosive e-ventuation or properizing event -- is the authentic co-respondence to Being. The debt is not thereby discharged, recompense is not paid, so much as the debt is acknowledged and renewed, reiterated, recapitulated, 'thematized' (affirmed, perhaps, in the sense of Nietzsche's amor fati). As for history as the history of violence, I venture to anticipate Tom Blancato's irresponsible response: no thanks. Cheers, Paul N. Murphy --- from list heidegger-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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