Abstract
This paper examines another crucial step in the development and unfolding of Heidegger’s hermeneutic phenomenology. In this essay, an attempt is made to outline the “projecting-opening” of world as the key to a phenomenological access to being. This projecting-opening makes explicit both the error of the attempt by “pragmatism” to reduce world to the totality of the self’s dealings with equipment on the one hand, and, on the other, the importance of translating Heidegger’s key phrase of “das Seiende im Ganze” in a manner recalling Dasein’s situation within the world, that is, as “beings in a whole” rather than “beings as a whole.”
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Notes
- 1.
Despite the clumsiness of the locution “the phenomenon: world,” I prefer to use it at times to what is perhaps the grammatically more graceful expression “phenomenon of world.” My preference is based on what I take to be suggestive in the latter phraseology, viz., that in addition to the world as phenomenon, there is another world, to which the world as phenomenon is somehow related or involved. In my view, however, this is precisely not what is at issue in Heidegger’s phenomenological treatment of “world.” Hence, in what follows I will employ at times the phrase “the phenomenon: world” in the attempt to forestall any suggestions regarding what is phenomenally at issue for Heidegger.
- 2.
Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, GA 2 (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1977), pp. 91, 103. Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1962), pp. 96–97, 107. While not a translation of the Gesamtausgabe edition, I have, for the benefit of the reader, cited from this Macquarrie-Robinson edition, albeit with slight modifications from time to time.
- 3.
See Parvis Emad, “Reference, Sign, and Language: Being and Time, Section 17,” in The Collegium Phaenomenologicum: The First Ten Years, ed. J. Sallis, G. Moneta, and J. Taminiaux (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1988), pp. 175–190; Joseph P. Fell, “The Familiar and the Strange: On the Limits of Praxis in the Early Heidegger,” in Heidegger: A Critical Reader, ed. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Harrison Hall (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1992), pp. 65–80. Robert Bernasconi, in Heidegger in Question: The Art of Existing (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, Inc., 1993), treats the issues underlying Sections 15–17 of Being and Time by way of an in-depth investigation of praxis and poièsis. Left unclarified in Bernasconi’s investigation, however, despite his stated intentions, is “the precise purpose of the discussion of equipment in Being and Time” (p. 5).
- 4.
GA 2, p. 90; tr. 95–96.
- 5.
Ibid.
- 6.
GA 2, p. 90; tr. 96.
- 7.
GA 2, p. 12; tr. 29.
- 8.
GA 2, p. 12; tr. 29.
- 9.
GA 2, p. 9; tr. 26.
- 10.
GA 2, pp. 6–7; tr. 23.
- 11.
GA 2; p. 74; tr. 82.
- 12.
GA 2; p. 118; tr. 121–122.
- 13.
GA 2, pp. 75–76; tr. 82–83.
- 14.
Michel Haar, “The Enigma of Everydayness,” in Reading Heidegger: Commemorations, ed. John Sallis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), pp. 20–28.
- 15.
See Hubert Dreyfus, “Heidegger’s History of the Being of Equipment,” in Heidegger: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1992), pp. 173–185; Mark Okrent, Heidegger’s Pragmatism: Understanding, Being, and the Critique of Metaphysics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988); Richard Rorty, “Heidegger, Contingency, and Pragmatism,” in Heidegger: A Critical Reader, pp. 209–230.
- 16.
GA 2, p. 113; tr. 117.
- 17.
GA 2, p. 117; tr. 120.
- 18.
Ibid. It must be kept in mind, however, that the phenomenon: world is the ontological a priori condition not only of a being’s “being-character,” but also the condition of Dasein’s ontological capacity as the ontic a priori condition of being both like and unlike itself. Due to the fact that the phenomenon: world is the ontological a priori condition of both beings and Dasein, its a priori status is designated as ontological while the a priori status of Dasein is designated as ontic.
- 19.
Heidegger makes explicit the phenomenal character of the “for-the-sake-of-which” as being “for-the-sake-of-others” in Chapter IV when addressing “being-with” other Daseins.
- 20.
GA 2, p. 73; tr. 80–81.
- 21.
GA 2, pp. 58–59; tr. 68–69.
- 22.
Regarding elucidation of the Introduction to Being and Time, as well as discussion of being in section one of this Introduction, see F.-W. von Herrmann, Hermeneutische Phänomenologie des Daseins: Eine Erläuterung von “Sein und Zeit”, I. Einleitung: Die Exposition der Frage nach dem Sinn von Sein (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1985).
- 23.
H. Dreyfus, “Heidegger: History of the Being of Equipment,” pp. 173–185. Also, see H. Dreyfus, Being-in-the-Word: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1991), pp. 99–107. For a recent critique of Dreyfus’s pragmatism, see Frank Schalow, “How Viable is Dreyfus’s Interpretation of Heidegger? Anthropologism, Pragmatism, and Misunderstanding of Texts,” Heidegger Studies, 20 (2004): 17–33.
- 24.
Heidegger, Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis), GA 65 (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1989), p. 390. Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), p. 273.
- 25.
GA 2, p. 100; tr. 106.
- 26.
GA 2, p. 90; tr. 96.
- 27.
GA 2, pp. 75–76; tr. 82–83.
- 28.
GA 2, p. 92; tr. 97.
- 29.
Ibid.
- 30.
GA 2, p. 92; tr. 97.
- 31.
GA 2, p. 100; tr. 105.
- 32.
Ibid.
- 33.
GA 2, p. 101; tr. 106.
- 34.
GA 2, pp. 110–111; tr. 114.
- 35.
For a pertinent discussion of Heidegger’s description of the “open,” see GA 65, p. 329; tr. 230.
- 36.
GA 2, p. 107; tr. 111.
- 37.
GA 2, p. 40; tr. 52.
- 38.
GA 2, p. 41; tr. 54.
- 39.
GA 2, p. 40; tr. 52.
- 40.
GA 2, p. 110; tr. 113.
- 41.
GA 2, p. 110; tr. 113.
- 42.
Michael Lewis, Heidegger Beyond Deconstruction: On Nature (London: Continuum, 2007), p. 31. For further examples, see pp. 15, 19, 99. For a critique of the various problems that arise from this translation “beings as a whole,” see Parvis Emad, On the Way to Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy (Madison; The University of Wisconsin Press, 2007), pp. 15–16.
References
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Sena, M. (2011). A Purview of Being: The Ontological Structure of World, Reference (Verweisung) and Indication (Indikation). In: Schalow, F. (eds) Heidegger, Translation, and the Task of Thinking. Contributions To Phenomenology, vol 65. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1649-0_4
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