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