File spoon-archives/heidegger.archive/heidegger_2003/heidegger.0302, message 98


Date: Tue, 11 Feb 2003 22:55:42 +0800
Subject: Re: Help Wanted
From: Malcolm Riddoch <riddoch-AT-central.murdoch.edu.au>



Hi Niala,

> Did Heidegger ever give a definition of being? What was his last word 
> on it?
>  
> I recall somewhere something like "being is the giving that withdraws, 
> conceals itself in the act of giving". I also know that Heidegger was 
> really keen on the big role Nothingness plays in Being. Yet I'm afraid 
> I am confused, not really sure what he said.
>  
> Can someone enlighten me as to what exactly Heidegger wound up 
> thinking about Being? I mean, it was the BIG aim of his projects and I 
> feel kind of silly not knowing what he discovered.


One could say that he wound up his thinking about the term 'being' by 
returning to where he started, which is the question of being. It's 
still a question but I think a very abstractly concrete question and he 
ends up after 5 decades simply refining or widening the scope of this 
question in terms of 'openness' (die Lichtung) and 'presencing' 
(Anwesenheit), both of which are there at the start in his early 1920's 
lectures at Marburg University which lead up to Being and Time.

Was it Leibniz who asked the question 'why are there things rather than 
nothing at all'? Heidegger references this IIRC in 'The Concept of 
Being', and the question of the meaning of being simply asks about the 
meaning of the totality of everything that can be said to 'be' 
something rather than nothing. So it's not about any one thing or state 
of affairs but about everything. It's about self and world and the 
human understanding that discloses these.

So the question is about meaningfulness in general - about language, 
but also about perception (which includes as a subset objective things 
given in perception) as well as feeling or mood (attunement), and 
embodied practical activity - it's about how life as a whole and its 
flux of lived experience are constantly constituted in temporal change: 
Being and Time.

As phenomenology it's a first person perspective, the question of being 
asks about 'one's own' existence, this-here-now, which is where 
everything that is something is first encountered. So if you sit back 
from your computer for a moment and check out your surroundings perhaps 
you might glimpse the everyday familiarity within which you are already 
at work, in the way you orient yourself towards the things around you, 
the light breeze through the window, the hum of electric motors, 
friends talking somewhere, an ache in your neck etc. It's all so simple 
and self-evidently mundane but 'thisness' is what the question is 
about. I personally find it the strangest thing about this mundane life 
and existence... that it is at all.

These are just a few quick notes, the breadth of Heidegger's writing 
spans the 20th century and has its roots in its contemporary 
neo-Kantianism and back through mediaeval scholasticism through to the 
ancient greeks. His writing style went through several transformations 
and there are many ways of interpreting what he might have wound up 
thinking about Being... my own bias is towards his phenomenology.

Regards,

Malcolm Riddoch


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