Date: Tue, 25 May 1999 12:27:45 -0500
From: Allen Scult <allen.scult-AT-drake.edu>
Subject: Re: Existential death


         Reply to:   Re: Existential death


Henk van Tuijl wrote:

>
>To go just one step farther, questions about Heidegger's "my" as
>such cannot be asked. 
Indeed.  As the Godfather used to say, " It's not personal; it's business." 
 One of the things that continually astonishes me about reading heidegger is how "grounded" his ontological claims always seem to be, even though he and I could not be more different as ontic individuals.  I assume what makes those claims stick is that he is making them about philosophical dasein's  radical impulse to think Being.  Insofar as we keep our discussion phenomnenologically attuned to this thinking as a "basic movement of factical life," we're potentially in tune with one another and with Heidegger.

But one of the central problems withb staying in tune is our basic moodiness, including, and perhaps especially including Heidegger's. 
Is Heidegger's Angst truly Angst? - cannot
>be answered. His is a very personal, specific and exceptional kind
>of Angst. As my Angst is. However, the way Heidegger goes from
>not knowing towards knowing Being passes through this "my
>Angst". And the question may be asked why. Why does it play such
>a central role in going from "Man" to "my..."? Why Angst?

In the early twenties, it was Sorge that Heidegger argued was our fundamental means of phenomenological attunement.  His assaying of this claim "speaks" ( or should I say "sings") in the 1922 Aristotle essay much more tunefully I think  than does his arguments for the funamentality of Angst later in the decade.  This tunefulness must count for more than mere personal indiosyncrisy.  The way the words fit together as themslves evoking the relationship to Being being thought and thus attuning the reader to an already existing attunement to the "voice" (Heidegger's later punning of Stimme and Stimmung is to the point here) of Being is what's crucial.  Heidegger's role here is not as a model of how Dasein most fundamentally is, but rather his capacity to  see, think  and speak the fundamental relationships thorugh which Dasein constructs its understanding of Being.

Heidegger puts it this way in  Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics:

'Any fundamental-ontological construction asserts its truth in what its projection allows to be seen, i.e., in how it brings Dasein to its manifestness and lets its innert metaphysics be-there(da-sein)."

But then what is most fundamental to, or as he asks it in the Kant Book, " What is the fundament?" of this fundamental ontology.  It would seem to depend to a certain extent on the primary mood of our Befindlichkeit, and this is where we get into one of your questions regarding one's ontic ( really ontological) PREdisposition.  Some of us ( perhaps even at different times of our lives) are more fundamentally predisposed by  Angst than Sorge. Philosophy shouldn't depend on how sweaty our hands get when we face up to death.  Isn't  Finitude the more thinkably fundamental faundament to Dasein's capacity to think Being?  Heideger speaks of finiutude as "the most decisive for purposes of making the understanding of of Being possible." A couple of sentences later, Heidegger opens up finitude as the question to be thought in this regard:

"This factum consists in the fact that what is most finite is indeed known, but nevertheless has not been grasped.  The finitude of dasein- the understanding of Being-lies in forgetfulness."

Isn't its  moody PREdisposition as a PREdisposition  a primary forgotten dimension of Dasein's finitude and therefore of its understanding of Being?

Allen

Allen

Allen Scult
515 271 2869
http://www.mac.drake.edu/s/scult/scult.html








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