From: "Anthony Crifasi" <crifasi-AT-hotmail.com>
Subject: Re: What is "Dasein" *really*?
Date: Thu, 20 Apr 2000 22:41:15 PDT


Thom Whitby wrote:

> > [The 'They' self of 'everyday' life] is the enduring self of day to
> > day practical life
> > defined by your inter-relations with other, i.e., 'being-with'. Here
> > others constitute your identity, it is a public history of what you
> > do. But it is not an ontological reality separate from the 'They'
> > self.
>
>This reminds me of the "socialist" approach to identity-formation,
>whereby it's claimed that socialization gives us the distinction
>between self and other or socialness. But educational theory might
>dispute this, inasmuch as identity formation results from
>child-centered fostering of potential, rather than a conformist
>inculcation.

If you say that the "I" is prior to "They," then how can the "I" come to 
know the "They" at all? Sensation? No, since "I" don't know whether what "I" 
sense is anything other than "me" (as in a dream, for example). Thoughts? 
Same problem. So how does "educational theory" get around this problem?

>There-being, in "its" thereness is human
>intelligence in the flow of its own capacity for embodiment,
>focus--facing not "beings" but actual rooms. The chair isn't a
>"being"; it's a chair. What chairs have in common with books is not
>that they are beings (in some implicative sense of "Being" of beings),
>but that they are both things that are intelligible. The
>intelligibility of a chair (as *chair*) has to do with the developed
>comprehensibility of cultural-practical things. The intelligibility of
>a book (as *book*) has to do with the developed readability of strings
>of marks. That the chair is there and the book (as book) is there
>implicates the ontogeny--yes, Mr Eldred, the *ontogenesis*--of
>radically different theres--in a topography of temporalized thereness
>that is matured intelligence *comparing* and *contrasting* things.
>
>This is how intelligences work: *as* the manifold of things-in-action:
>a temporal expression (experience susceptible to phenomenology) of
>neural, experiential, and reflective intelligence....threefold at
>heart, perhaps....

How does "educational theory" address whether those "temporal expressions" 
are anything other than you? Or does it just assume this? That is the 
primary deficiency of psychologisms which Husserl cites when he argues that 
they are philosophically dependent upon phenomenology. Does what you are 
calling "educational theory" address this issue?

> > The fact that the [T.O.E] would be "methodologically relative"
> > shows, I think, that these theories are not as fundamental as you
> > think.
>
>But I *don't* think they're fundamental. Rather, the fundamentalist
>longing has *become* (for physics) not a search for singular being (a
>singular energy or hyperplasma at the moment of the Big Bang, say) but
>a pragmatic search for *working* integration of partial theories--with
>no ontological pretensions at all.

That is just substituting one foundation (pragmatism) for another. In other 
words, saying that it is OK for physics to be pragmatic "with no ontological 
pretensions at all" is itself a philosophical assertion concerning 
acceptable methodology. So you are not "methodologically relative" after 
all. I assume you therefore have some reason for this non-relativism on your 
part (unless, that is, you are just assuming dogmatically that it is OK for 
physics to be pragmatic "with no ontological pretensions at all"). What are 
these reasons?

Anthony Crifasi
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