Date: Mon, 31 Mar 2003 01:53:32 +0800
Subject: Re: Being and Time-section 2
From: Malcolm Riddoch <riddoch-AT-central.murdoch.edu.au>



On Saturday, March 29, 2003, at 08:40  PM, GEVANS613-AT-aol.com wrote in 
reply to my suggestion that:

> we all more or less understand without even thinking about it what it 
> means to say
> something or other 'is' something... yes?


> Jud:
> No. It is  the basic and fundamental misunderstanding of "is" [the 
> BE-word in its many conjugational guises] that  subverts the whole of 
> Heideggerianism
> and renders all that is extrapolated from this elementary misconstrual 
> totally vacuous. Heidegger's disarray can be found in his inability to 
> understand the role of the IS-word in that it only ever applies to the 
> existential modality of entities, and NEVER corresponds to the meaning 
> of  simple presence rather than non-presence, in the sense of: "Little 
> blue men exist on Mars." If we say: "There are little blue men on 
> Mars" we are using "there" as a pronoun, and the meaning of the 
> sentence is one describing the existential modality of the little blue 
> men as one of being on Mars. It does not address the simple 
> "existence" of the little blue men per se.   He persists in positing a 
> spurious "ontological difference" where none exists.

hmmmm... so this email text for instance, it is what it is, at least I 
assume someone called Jud is reading this and implicitly understands 
its simple existence as what it is whenever he reads it, and will 
perhaps respond and send yet more text as he has done in the past. 
Speaking for myself I can simply read this stuff without necessarily 
needing to think that it actually is an email, I don't have to 
explicitly think about its actuality, but still it is what it is... 
whatever you might think.

And generally in everyday usage we don't have to consider ontological 
meanings when we refer to things - if I say 'hey jud, check out your 
computer screen... it's what it is and it's certainly something' you 
can just look at it and agree with me... yes? I'd hope so, cos it 
should be already meaningful to you as what it already is in a general, 
unexplicated yet eminently obvious everyday sense, and without getting 
philosophical. On the basis of this simple notion of the 'being' of the 
screen we can then go on to argue about how we might put this being 
into words and then argue about the grammatical structure and semantics 
of those statements. But the fact that we can talk about 'something' 
implies that 'something' is already understood by us in some way or 
another, and that 'something' is already perceptible as what it is.

That's where ontology starts, and Heidegger's question of being is a 
fundamental ontological question, as far as I'm concerned it's all very 
simple and quite straightforward.

Cheers,

Malcolm



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