Date: Wed, 05 Aug 1998 07:23:33 -0700
From: Mike Staples <mstaples-AT-argusqa.com>
Subject: Re: Henry


Robert T. Guevara [W] wrote:

> Michael S writes:
> >Henry...where are you? I have a question. It may seem like an odd
> >question, but I have an odd interpretation of Heidegger sometimes.
> >
> >Zimmerman (Eclipse of the Self) says the following:
> >
> >For Heidegger, for something "to be" means for it to be revealed,
> >uncovered, made manifest. Being refers not to a thing but to the
> event
> >of being manifest."
> >
> >Would you agree with this?
>
> Hi Michael. I just happened to be looking at this when i read your
> note.
> Maybe Henry does or doesn't agree, but apparently H himself addressed
> this
> very question.
>
> dreyfus' _Being in the world_ p11
>
> [...]
> If one writes Being with a capital B in english, it suggests some
> entity;
> indeed, it suggests a supreme Being, the ultimate entity. I have
> therefore
> decided to translate Sein by "being" with a lower-case b. But this
> attempt
> to make "being" look more like a form of the verb "to be" than like a
> noun
> has its own risks. One might get the mistaken idea that being for
> Heidegger
> is not an entity but some sort of event or process. Many commentators
> make
> this mistake. For example, Joseph Kockelmans gets his book on
> Heidegger off
> to a very bad start by noting, "Heidegger is never concerned with
> beings or
> things, but with meaning and Being; never with stable entities, but
> with
> events." Heidegger must have been aware of this danger, since at the
> point
> where he says being is not an entity, he writes in the margin of his
> copy
> of Being and Time, "No! One cannot make sense of being with the help
> of
> these sorts of concepts." To think of being in terms of concepts like
> entity, or process, or event is equally misleading.

Well thankyou Robert. Good'ol Dreyfus to the rescue again. Now I am
wondering about the statement I have seen several times on the list:
"The metaphysics of presence". I don't recall the specific posting, but
several times this was used. And I am wondering if this is referring
specifically to the metaphysics of beings as opposed to the being of
beings.

So here is this guy, Michael Zimmerman, who leaves these pot-holes in
his thinking for me to trip into. I have another book by Ernest Keen
called "A Primer in Phenomenological Psychology" that is filled with
such potholes. The problem is that I find the potholes to be growing
ever more subtle. On one page Keen writes that, "The goal of
phenomenological psychology is to reveal--for our explicit
understanding--ourselves to ourselves." And at first, I thought this
sounded pretty good. But then the pot holes began to emerge, and what he
ment by "ourselves" began to look very ontic all of a sudden. I tell
you, reading anyone but Heidegger himself is like walking through a
minefield (and even reading Heidegger himself is loaded with translation
explosives).

Michael S.





     --- from list heidegger-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---