File spoon-archives/heidegger.archive/heidegger_1998/heidegger.9802, message 4


Date: Sun, 1 Feb 1998 15:56:53 -0500
From: Daniel McGrady <dMcGrady-AT-Compuserve.Com>
Subject: Re:    holism & hermeneutics


Daniel McGrady schrieb:
>  I think the Forms give the appearance of being substantialities but they
> are closer to modalities.  Substantial modalities or modal substances.  
> Neither of these work.  They are modes according to which presencing can
> take place.   And we know the problem Heidegger had with the term
> 'substantia' translating 'ousia'.  Take a modality like 'journeying'.  Is
> it a modality?   It is because it is a way of being, a way to be.  It is
> conditional for being-there.   It is a WAY-to be which establishes the
> ground for any interpretive 'as'.   It is a way-OF-being in that the
> individual intends being according to that way.    It is also a way-TO BE
> in that it requires intentional striving. .   As way-to be it holds the
> journeyman open to the way as that which is separate from him(his Other) 
> while constituting him.   So there is otherness (to be) and identity
> (constituting) working together.  As way- to- be for all cases of journey
> and journeymen it is (O)ther.   

I follow you (_akoloutho_).

> The point about Father was not to show that it had a necessary bearing,
> relation on Son, but that it also functions as a way-to-be.   As a mode
it
> easily nominalizes.    But to be a father is to be fatherly.     A father
> is only a father when he exists a la mode.   It is not the individuality
> that makes him one but his 'as'.  'Father' does decline adverbially,
> fatherly, but in a way to show its more original force of how beying does
> generate beings.   And if beying is to be accessed then the kind and
range
> of generation needs to be traced carefully.  

>How does this translate with an example such as 'stone'? Is it a matter of

>interpreting 'The stone stones stonily', where 'stonily' is primary? Can
the 
>stone only be modally (the same word as 'moodily') for Dasein?

The individual shows itself at first according to a way of being.   So
there must be individual in the mode of.   'The stone stones stonily'
brings together different facets of da-sein, even though derivatively from
the human that brings it out.   The modal is working as the hupokeimenon,
that according to which it always presences if it is to be a stone.   And
presencing accordingly it presences stonily.   The whole analysis requires
working out the workings of sub-ject, ob-ject and pro-ject.   The sub-ject
subsumes under a modal, the project applies it and the object stands
against it.   This requires an analysis that I think possibly surprised
Heidegger.  It is certainly not  a reciprocal relation of subject and
object.   For the subject is  not in immediate relation to the object, but
directs itself first to a modal in order to come under it, in order to
access the object and let it stand out according to the mode which is
presented.   Such an analysis of subjectivity shows it to be a form of
submissiveness.    Although Heidegger may have given the impression that
objects are accessed by projects.   As though objects had a derivative mode
of being from human projects.   Which holds that it is the subject that
addresses the object.    But then this leads to an anthropocentric bearing
upon things which Heidegger sought to deny.   Such a view is more akin to
Sartre.   This is one reason why I said earlier that 'sustainability' is
not Heideggerean.   It is Sartrean because it gives objects their being in
terms of pour-soi, in this case pour-nous.   Take the environment as a huge
larder and you can still treat it under sustainability.   

>I find your method (way) interesting: leading the substantives 
>phenomenologically back to modes of presencing instead of declining from
the 
>substantive.

The method (methodos - [meta kai hodos] according to the way) must be
ontologically open in that it is the way of accessing the stone as well as
providing the  grounds for this x presenting itself in the form of this
mode, according to this way.   Methods are abstractions from an original
opening of the thing, so that now that we know how it opens, we can subject
ourselves to that way, for the sake of opening it up in the same way.  
Methods, ways, then form part of the clearing.    Ways in which we open,
ways in which we know things open according to, ways which we merely have
to subject, submit ourselves to so that they will open.

>> If you take the 'posturing of beings' in substantially, then I think
this
>> fails to think out posturing.   When you think back to how the modal
>> generators work, then being as presencing must be presupposed by the one
>>taking it up and being taken up.   They intend to individualize, presence
>> according to this mode.    But though the modal is conditional for such
>> presencing, its own being is not characterizable in terms of such
>> presencing.   For one thing it does not individualize.   Nor does it
>> spatialize.   Unless we talk about logical space.

>Could you say more about "its [the modal's] own being is not
characterizable in 
>terms of such > presencing"? I don't know if I follow. 

Modals are merely the how of the presencing, which we hold open knowingly
as ways in which we may presence others.   Presencing always requires
being-there.   Modals have no being-there.   They are no-things.  There is
nowhere they are.   Although if you want to presence them then you have to
have to do so by earthing them, even when you want to keep them in abstract
form.  Thus 'the way' is present in the form of scratchings.

May your modals go with you... 

Daniel


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