Authentic Grasp of Being
Martin Heidegger provides an interesting lesson about what must be done to authentically grasp the nature of being in Being and Time. The focus of being in his book is the unique individual human consciousness referred to as Dasein, and authenticity is regarded as that which accords with Dasein’s own self, including its history, present concerns, and future possibilities. The thesis of this paper is an interpretative one: the path to authentically grasping one’s own being requires first disregarding philosophical history regarding being and then understanding one’s own presuppositions. More fully, the phenomena that give rise to examining ontology must be analyzed, which means that one must not simply start with philosophers’ assertions; then one must understand his or her own manner of dealing with being to understand his or her own presuppositions about being, and it will be seen how the presence of all presuppositions cannot be removed. The first part of this paper will discuss section six, “The Task of Destroying the History of Ontology,” and the second part will discuss section 32, “Understanding and Interpretation.” It will conclude with a brief return to the concept of authenticity.
The Task of Destroying the History of Ontology
Heidegger comes upon the need to destroy the history of ontology as he begins his inquiry into the nature of being. What he first intends to do is understand how the question of being has been answered throughout the history of philosophy and then appraise this body of answers to see how our philosophical starting point may help or hinder us. Heidegger reviews an extensive amount of work, but he believes that it all falls short of understanding being. Worse than...
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...what it must be like to authentically grasp our being. First (section six), nothing is gained by being spoon-fed empty statements about general concepts of being, so we must strip away ontological assumptions provided by the history of philosophy. Second (section 32), it is clear that we are not stripping away all assumptions, but we are looking to ourselves to find the groundwork. If we are finding what is within ourselves, then we are grasping the authentic; if we are using knowledge of ourselves to inquire into being, then we are making an authentic attempt at understanding being. Apparently, the historical attempts to remove all presuppositions are what led to the failure of the long human tradition that has tried to understand being.
Bibliography
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper & Row, 1962.
Personal identity, in the context of philosophy, does not attempt to address clichéd, qualitative questions of what makes us us. Instead, personal identity refers to numerical identity or sameness over time. For example, identical twins appear to be exactly alike, but their qualitative likeness in appearance does not make them the same person; each twin, instead, has one and only one identity – a numerical identity. As such, philosophers studying personal identity focus on questions of what has to persist for an individual to keep his or her numerical identity over time and of what the pronoun “I” refers to when an individual uses it. Over the years, theories of personal identity have been established to answer these very questions, but the
Take a minute to relax. Enjoy the lightness, or surprising heaviness, of the paper, the crispness of the ink, and the regularity of the type. There are over four pages in this stack, brimming with the answer to some question, proposed about subjects that are necessarily personal in nature. All of philosophy is personal, but some philosophers may deny this. Discussed here are philosophers that would not be that silly. Two proto-existentialists, Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche, were keen observers of humanity, and yet their conclusions were different enough to seem contradictory. Discussed here will be Nietzsche’s “preparatory human being” and Kierkegaard’s “knight of faith”. Both are archetypal human beings that exist in accordance to their respective philosopher’s values, and as such, each serve different functions and have different qualities. Both serve the same purpose, though. The free spirit and the knight of faith are both human beings that brace themselves against the implosion of the god concept in western society.
In chapter three there is a somewhat disparate side of the ontological argument. It centers on the nature of God than the meaning of him. Particularly, this chapter centers on the early quality of God that is the fact that he needs to exist. Inanimate things, supplementary living things, and humans are ...
Descartes’ epiphany of “I exist, I am” was the catalyst for the exploration of the issues he discusses in Meditations. Although I find problems in some instances of his reasoning, I realize that he has provided answers through his Method of Doubt that have endured the ages and allow us to continue to ponder their truth today.
Heidegger proposed "to demonstrate, by the success of an actual interpretation of [Plato’s gigantomachia] that this sense of Being [as presence] in fact guided the ontological questioning of the Greeks...." I will show Heidegger failed this self-imposed test. Then with Heidegger’s interpretation as a starting point, I will show the basic structure of the text.
John Locke wrote An Essay Concerning Human Understanding in 1689. He strongly defends empiricism in this essay and states his views on human knowledge and true understanding. In Book II, Locke offers his theory of personal identity; namely the mind theory, also known as ‘the psychological criterion’, in the middle of his accounts of general identity where he draws lines between inert objects, living things and persons.
Kraus, Peter. "Heidegger on nothingness and the meaning of Being." Death and Philosophy. Ed. Jeff Malpas and Robert C. Solomon. New York: Routledge, 1998.
Rhetoric that is said to be deliberative attempts to persuade the audience to take action. The action that needs to be taken varies by example, however in the case of Martin Heidegger, he clearly advocates for mankind to retain their “essential nature”. Throughout the speech, it can be concluded that Heidegger has two main claims: that man’s autochtany (state of indigenity or belonging to a native region) is threatened by the emergence and superiority of technological advancements. He warns that man must distance himself from the bondage of technology as well as become open to the mystery of its existence. Heidegger calls this theory of his, “releasement toward things and openness to the mystery of belonging together” (Heidegger). The other claim he makes states that man must hold on to his “essential nature” – in that man is a meditative being; capable of thinking and questioning beyond what is obvious or reasonable. The evidence Heidegger uses to support these claims is riddled throughout his address as he details man’s ability to think both meditatively and calculatively. Because man has both these characteristics, it is a God-g...
This paper is an initial attempt to develop a dynamic conception of being which is not anarchic. It does this by returning to Aristotle in order to begin the process of reinterpreting the meaning of ousia, the concept according to which western ontology has been determined. Such a reinterpretation opens up the possibility of understanding the dynamic nature of ontological identity and the principles according to which this identity is established. The development of the notions of energeia, dynamis and entelecheia in the middle books of Aristotle’s Metaphysics will be discussed in order to suggest that there is a dynamic ontological framework at work in Aristotle’s later writing. This framework lends insight into the dynamic structure of being itself, a structure which does justice as much to the concern for continuity through change as it does to the moment of difference. The name for this conception of identity which affirms both continuity and novelty is "legacy." This paper attempts to apprehend the meaning of being as legacy.
In order to understand the meaning of existence in relation to philosophy, we need to discuss its ordinary meaning and the various levels of existence. The Chambers Concise Dictionary (1992, 362) defines ‘exist’ as having an actual being; to live; to occur; to continue to live’ and it defines existence as ‘the state of existing or being’. In other words, the Dictionary does not make a distinction between existence and living. However, philosophically there is the view that existence is different from living. What then is the meaning of existence in philosophy? In order to answer this question we shall examine how philosophers have used the term in their various works. Our attention shall focus on Plato and Sartre.
One of the aims of Being and Nothingness is to describe consciousness, or human subjectivity. Sartre distinguishes two different modes of consciousness in order to accurately describe human subjectivity. These two modes are being-for-itself and being-for-others. Being-for-itself refers to a transcendent conscious being (Oaklander, 238). Transcendence is the antithesis of facticity. I will describe facticity first, in order to make the concept of transcendence more tractable. Facticity denotes the concrete details of the subject’s being including past decisions, plac...
In his 1971 paper “Personal Identity”, Derek Parfit posits that it is possible and indeed desirable to free important questions from presuppositions about personal identity without losing all that matter. In working out how to do so, Parfit comes to the conclusion that “the question of identity has no importance” (Parfit, 1971, p. 4.2:3). In this essay, I will attempt to show that Parfit’s thesis is a valid one, with positive implications for human behaviour. The first section of the essay will examine the thesis in further detail, and the second will assess how Parfit’s claims fare in the face of criticism. Problems of personal identity generally involve questions about what makes one the person one is and what it takes for the same person to exist at separate times (Olson, 2010).
What is personal identity? This question has been asked and debated by philosophers for centuries. The problem of personal identity is determining what conditions and qualities are necessary and sufficient for a person to exist as the same being at one time as another. Some think personal identity is physical, taking a materialistic perspective believing that bodily continuity or physicality is what makes a person a person with the view that even mental things are caused by some kind of physical occurrence. Others take a more idealist approach with the belief that mental continuity is the sole factor in establishing personal identity holding that physical things are just reflections of the mind. One more perspective on personal identity and the one I will attempt to explain and defend in this paper is that personal identity requires both physical and psychological continuity; my argument is as follows:
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Elrod, John. Being and Existence in Kierkegaard’s Pseudonymous Works. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1975.