Outline
Division I Chapter 6
Understanding, Care, and Truth. Heidegger’s account of Realism. A. Introduction and Summary: #39–#42.
l. #39: Thrownness, “experience,” care.”
2. #40: Dasein disclosed by its Angst: it is being-in-the-world that we are anxious about.
3. #41: Reapplication of the three existentials of Dasein: a. Understanding: possibility and what Dasein can be. b. State of mind: what one is through Being-in-the-world. c. Fallenness: how one hides from Angst.
d. Ontological nature of care. 4. #42: Historical root of Care: Faust. B. Dasein, Worldhood, and Reality: #43.
1. Subsection A: Reality as a problem of being: proof of the external world.
a. Foundationalism.
b. Kant’s Refutation of Idealism.
c. Idealism right: Reality is a function of understanding but wrong to ground everything in consciousness (resemblance to Dewey). d. No epistemological solution to the problem of the external world.
2. Subsection B: Reality as an ontological problem.
a. “The occurrent,” extended substance, and the partial disclosure of Being.
b. “Experience” an open-ended concept, not defined by tradition- al philosophy, consciousness not essential.
3. Subsection C: reality and care.
a. Nature neither occurrent nor available, “Nature” as an “inter- pretation.”
b. Dasein cannot be conceived in terms of reality and substantial- ity.
C. Dasein, Disclosure, and Truth: #44.
1. Subsection A: Truth as correspondence. How did this theory orig- inate?
a. Kant and the subject/object distinction. b. Correspondence as a disclosure of the world.
c. Heidegger’s example: Is representation essentially a mental pro- cess?
2. Subsection B: The derivative character of the traditional concep- tion of Truth.
a. Uncovering as a way of being for being-in-the-world. b. Dasein is “in the truth” but is also “in untruth.”
c. The traditional conception: truth is wrested away from entities. i. Truth as correspondence.
ii. Correspondence obscures the primary nature of truth as un- covering, as an action and not a state.
iii. Correspondence is the interpretation of the world as occur- rent.
3. Subsection C: The kind of Being which Truth possesses and the presupposition of truth.
a. Truth depends on Dasein: Dasein makes propositions. “‘There is’ truth only in so far as Dasein is and so long as Dasein is.”
i. Are there eternal truths? ii. No Dasein, no truth.
b. We presuppose that there is truth to be uncovered: we are “in the truth.”
c. The pure “I” as the mechanism of representation. Correspon- dence between two different kinds of things.
d. “Being (not entities) is something which ‘there is’ only in so far as truth is. And truth is only in so far and as long as Dasein is. Being and truth ‘are’ equiprimordially.”
e. Dasein has still not been brought into view as a whole.
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Division II Chapter 4, #69
This section continues some of the foregoing and comprises Heideg- ger’s philosophy of science. The introduction indicates: (1) that the “light” which discovers or “clears” an entity cannot be ontically oc- current (it is a form of Care and a transcendental limit of interpreta- tion); (2) the temporal character of being-in-the-world that transcends its objects. #69 falls into three parts:
A. Subsection A: The temporality of circumspective concern. 1. Availableness and involvement as contexts of use.
a. “In-order-to” relations.
b. “Letting something be involved” and Care. 2. The temporality of availability.
B. Subsection B: The temporality of Concern and the Theoretical Discovery of the occurrent within-the-world.
1. Praxis and Theory: if praxis is “theoretical,” then theories involve a praxis of their own. Science is a way of being-in-the-world.
a. The ascendance of “pure science” and the disappearance of prax- is.
b. Kant tries to eliminate scepticism about the connection between experience and reality but is still preoccupied with the metaphores of sight that gave rise to the problem in the first place.
2. The “As-structure” and science: the temporality of deliberation and interpretation.
3. The genesis of the theoretical stance.
a. Extension is derived from activities of involvement, not a “pri- mary quality” of an ontologically independent world.
b. The available, tools, can become an object of science. c. “The aggregate of the occurrent becomes the theme.” d. Rise of mathematical physics: quantifying the occurrent. 4. “In principle there are no bare facts.”
5. “Thematizing” the world: a distinctive kind of making-present. a. “Dasein projects itself towards its potentiality-for-being-in the ‘truth’.”
b. Dasein must transcend the entities thematized.
c. If Dasein does or thinks anything at all, a world must have been disclosed to it. How Dasein thinks about the world depends on how it was disclosed.
C. Subsection C: the temporal problem of transcending the world. 1. Dasein’s self understanding.
a. Care and the three ecstases.
b. The world is presupposed; but if no Dasein exists, “no world is there either.”
c. “The world is transcendent” because it has its origin or ground in “ecstatical temporality,” i.e., in the ecstases of care.
d. The world, therefore, is “further outside” than any object in the classical philosophical account of the structure of reality. The World is a transcendental limit for understanding (the activities— any activities—of Dasein). The world is not a thing.
2. Being-in cannot be accounted for by substance: substance presup- poses being-in, which presupposes care.
a. The world is not an occurrent thing or collection of things in space-time (#70 [369]).
b. Compare with [212] on the relation between reality and care.
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