Date: Mon, 31 Mar 2003 13:20:15 +0800
Subject: Re: Being and Time-section 2
From: Malcolm Riddoch <riddoch-AT-central.murdoch.edu.au>



On Monday, March 31, 2003, at 04:27  AM, GEVANS613-AT-aol.com wrote:

> Ahhhhhh yes...this text certainly exists in the modality of  email, 
> and the person who is referenced by and  who exists
> in the existential identificatory modality of Jud implicitly 
> understands that the existential modality of
> the text is being addressed, and not its simple existence, for 
> otherwise you would have typed
> something to the effect that the text simply exists, rather than 
> describing the mode or state of its existing
> as email text.

Huh? No really, you're just confusing yourself mate, it is quite 
simple. In order for you to talk about 'existential identificatory 
modalities', in order for you to talk at all about something, you must 
have already come to understand that something. Or put another way, the 
world is already meaningful before you start trying to put it into 
words and pull it apart into 'is statements'. Your entire analysis is 
epistemological rather than ontological, but we're talking about 
ontology here, and not just Heidegger's but ontology in general.

Quine's up with this, even given his strident critique of ontology. 
What we're looking for is the 'sensory barrage' and how to explain 
it... that's the question of being. The logical positivists opted for a 
one to one correlation of language with sense percepts, Quine opts for 
'myths' that more or less describe sense experience, phenomenology 
describes lived experience as a whole - 3 different ways of dealing 
with the 'being' question that nonetheless address ontology which is 
more than I can say for you.

The question of being is about that 'simple existence' you refer to, 
but considered ontologically and before you go off on one of your 
'existential modality' rants. At this point in BT we're working with 
the most general of introductory statements and what we're dealing with 
isn't even particularly 'Heideggerean', it's certainly phenomenological 
but it's also a very general philosophical statement about ontology.

And do you really not 'more or less understand without even thinking 
about it what it means to say something or other 'is' something'? Cos 
if so you must have a really hard time socially, wandering from one 
unidentified existential modality to the other and having to piece it 
all together on the fly while everyone else already just understands 
everything in an average kind of way.

Cheers,

mr


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