Ep. 296: Heidegger Questions Being (Part One)

0:07 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who are at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 296 is something like what is our relationship to the world? And we read Heidegger's book Being and Time, the introduction in chapters one through three from 1926. For more information, please visit partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer, just being in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:33 Seth: This is Seth Paskin with a vague understanding of myself, which is still a positive phenomenon in Austin, Texas.

0:41 Wes: This is Wes Alwan, factical not factual, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:48 Seth: Dirty Boy.

0:49 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey trying to get a leg up on the Dasein in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:58 Mark: Nice folks. Should have just listened to our reissued episode 32. Or maybe you listened to it many years ago when we originally put it out. But we just listened to it and we just reintroduced it and got it at top of mind entirely so we would not have to repeat ourselves now. So I think we should regard everything said about that, about sort of the general. What Heidegger's general project is has already said, unless you have great new thoughts as we go. Instead, I went through and I pulled some sections out for us to kind of do a close reading of.

And in fact, that's kind of all I did. I listened to the audiobook version through here. I figured out what sections I thought we should close read. I read through those, you know, just to write them down. But I have no other notes for this week myself other than these are the sections we're going to close read. How did you guys approach it this time?

1:54 Dylan: I read it for the first time.

1:55 Mark: Well, then that's good to treat it in a more normal way.

1:59 Dylan: But I love the idea of doing the close reading in the sections that you suggested, Mark. I think that those are really good ones.

2:06 Wes: We didn't do much of a close reading in that other episode, even though it was very good as a general overview. So this will be a good deep dive for me. This was oddly pleasurable experience. I had the experience of feeling like, wow, Heidegger's not that hard to understand after all. And I don't know why that is. I don't know if that's just years of being corrupted now by it's all that freaking Hegel you read Philosophy in particular. Hegel, yeah. But really odd experience in that sense. So I found it enjoyable. I felt like I maybe I'm comparing this to late Heidegger. And remembering how horrifically indecipherable that was.

2:47 Seth: But I had the same experience as Wes. I was, like, shocked at how easy it was to read relative to what I remember. And also kind of like, simultaneously on a shame spiral, like, what was I doing in graduate school? And what did I think I was doing? And just feeling like I had such an exceptionally naive understanding and maybe I'm just better educated now. It was too hard a text for me to try to take on it in my 20s without the background. But the other part of it is, you know, just, I'm angry now at the three of you for dragging me back into this because I thought I had put him aside and had moved on with my life.

And I'm like, this is actually really good. And Wes, to your point, I'm like, I wonder if the later stuff makes more sense if we go and read it now, comparatively. And I'm like, I'm now feeling the draw to get back into this, and I really don't want to. It's like being a heroin addict and you're clean for 20 years, and then your douchebag friends start doing drugs around you and you can't, oh, this is pretty good.

4:00 Dylan: The only Heidegger I had read before was later stuff. The Question Concerning Technology and stuff like that? And what is metaphysics, which I guess is a little bit later, though, apparently touches on similar themes. I also found it a lot easier to read than I expected. I mean, he's definitely idiosyncratic, but I think a lot of what we've done over the past couple years feeds into this. This whole space of trying to figure out how to talk about our relationship to the world, what human beings are, what the world is, in a way that doesn't run afoul of the kinds of paradoxes that you end up getting into with Plato or Descartes, in which you're trying to account for things changing, but things also being one thing, many things together at the same time as being one thing.

And there's an experience to have, but it's also dynamically changing. And I think that's a super, super rich place to be. And he talks about it and lays out the question. So, I mean, to me, just so cogently that it's one of the most interesting things I've read in a long time.

5:17 Wes: You know, I even thought of our Quine episode with this. I thought, huh, there's some interesting crossover with Quine, because Quine, in a similar way, is dealing with Cartesian assumptions and trying to get on an anti mentalist footing. He does that in a kind of behavioral way. And he's focusing more on epistemology than ontology, although the two are of course related. But I think the way to get into this is think of someone as trying to translate mentalist language typically and talk of consciousness and typical assumptions about radically separate entities like human subjectivity or consciousness and non conscious things.

Think of someone as trying to translate that into an ontology in which human consciousness is fundamental. So there's some commonality there with Hegel. But what's interesting about Heidegger is he's searching for a language which in a way is neutral when it comes to the question of whether something is, let's say, mental or non mental. So you get this idea that someone might say, hey, if we want to learn about the world, let's first talk about the structure of human consciousness. Right? That's the Kantian approach and that's what Hegel criticizes in the phenomenology.

You really think you're going to ascertain the instrument beforehand? It's not that transparent. It doesn't work like that. But in this case, we're out to study being. But that doesn't just mean physical objects out there in the world. What better way to study being than to study human beings? And in fact, that has priority for Heidegger. That's where we start. We start with Dasein with human beings, and that's our entry point into ontology.

7:08 Dylan: As we start the close reading, that argument for why to start with Dasein is really super interesting.

7:15 Mark: So starting the close reading, the introduction. Introduction one, section one, the second page of it has a number one here. First, it has been maintained that being is the most universal concept. And then there's some Greek which was translated in my audio version, but which I did not translate.

7:33 Wes: These are three prejudices, by the way, that he's outlining, not his point of view.

7:37 Mark: Yes, yes, it has been maintained. Right. This is going to be Aristotle. So we just did Aristotle's categories. He says, quoting Aristotle, an understanding of being is already included in conceiving anything which one apprehends as an entity.

7:50 Wes: Right?

7:51 Mark: So you might think there's nothing else to say about being, it's just the, the universal genus. But Heidegger says, but the universality in quotes of being is not that of a class or genus. The term being does not define that realm of entities which is uppermost. And these are articulated conceptually according to genus and species. Right? So you got man is rational, animal and then there are animals, and being is on top of animal. Or there might be some intervening things, but you might think that being is just the uppermost category.

8:21 Wes: Being is not a genus in the sense that you can't define a species by specifying, hey, this is an existent, and then here are the differentia. So I'm thinking out loud here, but man is an animal that reasons or something. Right? Like that. Right. So in any definition like that, you're relating a species to a higher level genus and then adding some differentia to specify the species. And with being, being is not functioning as a genus for any lower level category in the same way, although I can't think of why right now. So someone help me.

8:59 Dylan: One way to articulate the question is that if humans and dogs and cats and elephants and blue whales are all mammals, then each individual is an instance of a species that are all under mammals. Then why, when he gives examples of beings or kinds of being, why aren't those just instances of the super genus being in the same way that humans and dogs and cats are mammals?

9:31 Wes: We talked about this in Aristotle's categories, because this is Aristotle's point of view, if I remember correctly, that he's outlining. So.

9:38 Mark: So the next thing Heidegger says here is Aristotle himself knew the unity of this transcendental universal as a unity of analogy, in contrast to the multiplicity of the highest generic concepts applicable to things. With this discovery, in spite of his dependence on the way in which the ontological question had been formulated by Plato, he put the problem of being on what was in principle a new basis. But then even he was confused. So the germ of this understanding, if you wanted to argue whether this is Aristotle's position or not, that being is the highest genus, you would have to say, well, you know, just like man is rational animal, and so animal is the genus, then animal is the thing that the being that moves and breathes and, you know, has a nutritive soul.

Or you could define it and just say it's like that, being is like that. But it's not really like that, because we were able to say with animal about the genus, we were able to

10:31 Seth: say some substantial things, because ultimately the notion of a genus requires the ability to define a set of properties that determine what falls under that genus. Like it starts with the lower order, like it has a spine or an exoskeleton, or, you know, breathes underwater, or it lays eggs or whatever. And as you ladder up the definitions or the set of properties that you use to Describe. Get more abstract or more abstruse. But ultimately what he's trying to say is it's not like you can ladder up and get to being and that it. There's a way of saying being as a genus means everything that has this property or everything that fits it.

11:11 Wes: Normally every. Every genus, right, can be treated as a species of something higher. So this is the most straightforward part of this. We can't ever treat being itself, right, as the result of adding differentiae to some higher genus, right? So we. Being is not a species. Certainly it's a little less clear to me why being isn't a genus, except for the fact that it isn't also a species.

11:37 Dylan: The reason it's not a species is. So one reason I might ask that is Dasein is one example of being, which is the one he's going to focus on, and he gives other examples of being. So just by being able to say that sentence, I'll give a list of beings, and I'm going to talk about Dasein as the being associated with humans. And I want to pick that one because I want to try to articulate what being is. I'm going to focus in on that and I'll have my reasons for doing that, which we'll get to. Why isn't that just a list of examples of kinds of being?

I mean, he says here, along the lines of what Seth said, that Aristotle. He says Aristotle understood that he was basically making an analogy. So he doesn't want to completely blame Aristotle for this genus mistake. But that is illuminating that he's saying it's an analogy. It's a hierarchical analogy, but it's distinct in kind. I kind of wondered if it was like, well, the distinction between infinity in real numbers and an integer. I mean, infinity is something that is not a number.

12:47 Wes: Here's the part we know that Aristotle says that being is not a genus because every genus must be differentiated, must have differentia that fall outside the genus, which sounds like something you would say about a species. But Aristotle says this about the genus. So I think what we're trying to say is, well, why did he say that about the genus? I think we had a cogent explanation in the categories episode. I've just forgotten it.

13:10 Mark: What I remember from the categories episode is that we were just asking why is the ontology have to be these categories as opposed to being is the overall category, and then substances and properties and things are within that. And it was something along the lines of. I don't know that. It was just that every Genus has to also be a species, like, so substance is a genus because it's also a species of being, because it sounds like being really should be something that is outside the genus species relation altogether.

13:41 Wes: What he does say, though, is that the genus needs differentiae that fall outside of it. So. And Aristotle's example is that we have nothing to contrast being to. Maybe, let's put it this way, except for non being, which Aristotle didn't like. He didn't like saying, okay, how do we carve out the genus being? What do we have it to contrast it to? Non being? You know, he's not as fond of that.

14:04 Dylan: Yeah, it's just sort of like saying, what thing are you going to contrast being with? What's the non being thing? You sort of get into an absurdity.

14:11 Seth: Yep.

14:12 Mark: So can we move on to the next section?

14:14 Dylan: Sure.

14:14 Mark: So this was section two, not to be confused with the number two. That's right after the number one that we just read. But a couple pages later, on page 24 of my edition, section 2, the formal structure of the question being. So I just was wondering, what is the question? Who wants to read this one?

14:30 Dylan: Do you want to start from the top or do you want to start from the second paragraph?

14:33 Mark: The second paragraph is good. Yeah, go ahead.

14:35 Dylan: Every inquiry is a seeking. Every seeking gets guided beforehand by what is sought. Inquiry is a cognizant seeking for an entity both with regard to the fact that it is and with regard to its being as it is. This cognizant seeking can take the form of investigating in which one lays bare that which the question is about and ascertains its character. Any inquiry as an inquiry about something has that which is asked about. But all inquiry about something is somehow a questioning of something. So in addition to what is asked about, an inquiry has that which is interrogated in investigative questions. That is, in questions which are specifically theoretical, what is asked about is determined and conceptualized. Furthermore, in what is asked about, there lies also that which is to be found out by the asking. This is what is really intended. And the. With this, the inquiry reaches its goal.

15:35 Wes: So you guys are not going to like this, but I read a different translation because I just picked up the one that we did for the last episode, and I assume that was the one we all did. It's a more recent translation. I think it's. People are more fond of it at this point, and it's a bit clear, but I don't. I don't think it's going to be a huge problem. But beyond that, this is a really interesting section because it's. He's just laying out Meno's problem, right? And it's going to lead him into the hermeneutic circle. And you know, the interesting idea behind Meno is that to inquire into something, we already have to in a sense know what it is, right?

We can't say, you know, hey, I want to investigate X and have no idea what X is, because then I have no idea what I'm looking for. So I have at least a vague and fuzzy idea of the thing that I'm looking for and then I can make it more explicit. And I think that vagueness and fuzziness will be related later on to are being in the world in the sense of having a kind of procedural know how relationship with the world. That's what we start with in our investigation. In the same way that we would start with a vague, you know, concept in a more ordinary investigation.

Like what is a rabbit? Well, I know rabbit is that hopping thing over there, but now I want to know what it is scientifically, I want to really know what it is. Dissect a rabbit and so on and so forth. But yeah, go ahead.

16:55 Dylan: So Plato solves that problem for Meno, right, with the myth of recollection and the idea that all the knowledge is contained within us. And we are basically refinding that. So it all exists out there and it really is a process of rediscovery of something that we already know. And what this is laying out and what we're going to get to is that it's a creative act, that we are figuring things out in an active way, and that it's not an uncovering, it's an activity.

17:32 Wes: It's worth saying that recollection, right, is Plato's early version of talking about the cogito and categories in the Kantian sense, right? This is like cognitive structure. And Heidegger is going to do a variation on all that, right, his categories, he's going to give us the existentials instead a set of categories that's more oriented towards Dasein as a starting point instead of oriented towards material things.

17:57 Dylan: One comment I wanted to make about this section and the way he talks about inquiry and he says things like different aspects of inquiry has the that which is asked about and the that which is interrogated and that which is to be found out by the asking. Those are really, really reminiscent about the way Aristotle talks about categories.

18:21 Wes: Yeah, in my translation it's thatness and whatness. I find it very Helpful, because this is about existence and essence, right? The whatness has to do with the essence and the thatness is about something's existence, that it exists. And Heidegger famously. Well, he's going to have two formulations in our reading today. One is that existence has priority over essence for Dasein, which is reminiscent of Sartre. But at one point he'll say, the essence of Dasein is its existence, so it is just its thatness. This distinction is really important because he's going to have something counterintuitive for the sake of this investigation into Dasein. It's not a typical Aristotelian investigation. Well, it isn't. It isn't. We look into the whatness of Dasein and we find existence and thatness.

19:09 Seth: But there's a section later where he talks about, in the worldhood section where he says, you know, if you're asking about what something is versus asking about what kind of being does it have? Those are two different questions. And so the section kind of presages that in that we're not here talking about. I don't even know that I can come up with any other language. It like, makes sense to me in my head, but never mind.

19:34 Wes: Here's another angle from this section which is really quite insightful and interesting, which is that because it's a very good version of the cogito, right? Where Descartes says, I think, therefore I am, or Augustine says, I err, therefore I am. If I'm in error, there's a person being in error having the error. In this case, my translation is as an attitude adopted by a being, the questioner questioning has its own character of being. So simply by asking the question, the question is highly typical of the kind of being we are. We're inquisitive beings and we already get insight into our own ontology simply by noting the fact that we're asking the question. It's constitutive of us that we would even be asking this question about ourselves. It's part of the structure of our being.

20:24 Mark: So before we move on to the next section, I just. The reason I picked this is because when I originally was listening to it, it just sounded like the most pedantic thing that I had ever heard. Like, when you ask a question, there's something you're saying and there's something you're asking about, and there's somebody you're. You're asking the question up. Like it just seemed, what are you even doing here? And it's only really the next page where he gives this punchline, inquiry is a kind of seeing must be guided beforehand by what is sought. So the meaning of being must already be available to us in some way, which is just this meno thing.

20:55 Wes: Yeah, but in particular, the way it's available to us. There's the analogy to meno. But then there's something special about this, because if we want to know what the rabbit is, the thing that's a priori is not the question, what is a rabbit? But in the case of Dasein and ontology, if I'm asking about being, right, the question is a form of being. Just by asking the question again, I come into an immediate relation to the kind of being typical of Da sign, the interrogating inquisitive part.

21:28 Mark: Well, and I don't know if this is exactly what you're saying, but he also points out in the next sentence that you ask, what is being? You're using the word is. That sounds like circular definitions are bad. But a circular question, a question that presupposes the thing that you're trying to ask about that's uniquely interesting.

21:45 Wes: Well, he warns us off that worry about circulating in the same way that Quine does.

21:50 Dylan: And he points out just after this that even given everything that we don't know, this vague average understanding of being is still a fact. And then later on, its very indefiniteness is itself a positive phenomenon which needs to be clarified. So the fact that we even ask the question what is being? And all the vagueness of that is that is circular in a certain sense, is a positive phenomenon that is indicating something.

22:19 Mark: So next section, the ontical priority of the question of being, this is section four. So really the question was to get at the difference between some of these terms. So ontic versus ontological versus ontico, ontological on the one hand, and then existential versus existential, and why these are important. I probably was clear on this before. Just that ontic has to do with specific beings, whereas ontological, like the study of being. Right, is about the thing that we're concerned here, being with a big B, as opposed to beings with a small B. That is the thing. So we already, in what we just considered Aristotle, if you try to break everything into categories, then you're talking about individual beings, you're not necessarily talking about their being big B. I think I

23:06 Wes: have something helpful to say about this, but I admit that I'm cheating from Dreyfus. When we're talking about the ontic, we are thinking about beings. So in particular, properties of beings, right? It's quite simple. And if they're non-Dasein beings, if it's a being of another kind than Dasein, it's just typical properties like being red or something like that, or anything that we talk about in science. If it's Dasein, then we get into factical properties as opposed to factual properties. So we get into roles of being a student, being this kind of person, being that kind of person.

When we do the ontological stuff for the what type of beings for the factual stuff, we do the Kantian categories or the Aristotelian categories. When we do ontology for Dasein, we do existentials, like facticity, like being with. So existential is associated with the ontic and existential is associated with the ontological. So when you see the word existential, you should be thinking about, okay, this is ontology and it's Heidegger's variation on the categories, what he's doing with the existentials for Dasein. It's his twist on that.

24:19 Mark: Maybe we should read some quotes from here. So a couple of the third paragraph of this section here, being ontological is not yet tantamount to developing an ontology. So if we should reserve the term ontology for that theoretical inquiry which is explicitly devoted to the meaning of entities and what we have in mind in speaking of Dasein's being ontological is simply to be designated as something pre ontological. It does not signify being ontical, however, but rather being in such a way that one has an understanding of being. That was not the best paragraph to

24:52 Wes: read to make this clear. So we have a pre theoretical understanding of being. And why do we have that? Well, it's like all of this pivots around procedural or tacit knowledge, like the kind of knowledge we would have when we use a tool or when we play tennis, know how rather than know that or even know what. So that is our first acquaintance with being, and that's the sense in which we're ontological. We're closest to being in that sense, in that use sense. But that doesn't mean we have a spelled out ontological philosophical theory of being. So he's pointing us to two different senses of ontology here. And of course, this is meno again, right? The pre theoretical know how ontology that we have is going to form the basis of a more philosophical ontology.

25:42 Mark: Let's do the next paragraph. So he, he gets another page or so before he actually brings in onto ontological and sort of puts the three terms in order. But first he feels the need to talk about existens, Right, Existence. So the next paragraph, that kind of being towards which Dasein can comport itself in one way or another and always does comport itself, we call existence. Existenz is the same thing. And because we cannot define Dasein's essence by citing the what of the kind that pertains to a subject matter, and because its essence lies rather in the fact that in each case it has its being to be and has as its own, we have chosen to designate this entity as Dasein, a term which is purely an expression of its being.

So this is not the first time he's using some of these terms. It might make me a little hard to understand in isolation. But for instance, it has as its own, that is an important thing that an individual, like a sock, it doesn't have as its own. But because we are Dasein, the kind of being that worries about its own being, then we have a point of view. We have something as sense. I can think of sort of as

26:50 Wes: itself even more than that, right? So in my translation, Dasein always understand itself in terms of its existence, in terms of its possibility to be itself or not to be itself. So in other words, we can have an identity crisis. We can think about who we are, what we are, whether we are being what we are. And then at the very end of this, so he'll say existence is decided, right? We could be authentic or inauthentic. Existence is decided only by each Dasein itself in the manner of seizing upon or neglecting such possibilities. And this will be very important possibility and time, right, which is implicated in possibility will be become a very important part of saying what Dasein is.

But at the very end of this, he says we shall call this kind of understanding of itself existential understanding. The question of existence is an ontic affair of Dasein, which is to say, going back to my Dreyfus cheat sheet, the existential ontic affair asks we ask ourselves about our properties, which is to say our roles, right? Who am I? What am I? What roles am I fulfilling as a person? So instead of asking about in science, we would say what are the physical properties of something? What is the atomic weight of hydrogen for us? Of course, we don't ask about our properties as Dasein in material ways like that.

That doesn't make any sense. I'm not asking as Dasein. My ontic questions about myself don't involve my weight, although they kind of do when I get on the scale every morning. Okay. But you know, they concern my identity, including My roles.

28:25 Dylan: Would I be doing a parallel thing if I was asking a question about hydrogen rather than how much does hydrogen weigh and what other fundamental particles is it made up of? Am I asking something closer along the lines of what you're saying about Dasein? If I'm asking about hydrogen, what does it connect to? What reactions does it partake in? What role does it have with respect to? Even more interesting one, carbon. What role does it have with respect to the other beings and entities in the world?

28:58 Wes: Yeah, I mean that might be better. I mean these are ontic questions in both cases. These are existential ontic questions just on the material side and on the Dasein side. But yeah, maybe your way of putting that is more revealing, you know, reveals the analogy in a closer way.

29:14 Dylan: This roles bit is I think, very illuminating.

29:17 Wes: Right.

29:17 Dylan: The way you're talking about it for Dasein. But it makes me want to think about. Feynman used to say that be characterized as someone who tried to think about what it is to be an electron and part of that would be what its roles were.

29:33 Seth: I think maybe partially yes and partially no. For me, the important part here is that Dasein has a certain kind of maybe awareness isn't the right as he says. For Dasein, it's being is an issue. And what that means is it experiences itself in terms of. In some way, as Wes said, with possibilities. But like that it should be a certain way almost, or that it. It has a way that it could be. I think what he's trying to say is no other beings, like a neutron doesn't think, am I being a good neutron? Am I following the right thing of being a neutron?

30:10 Dylan: Yes. And a worm doesn't think that either, right?

30:13 Seth: No.

30:13 Dylan: Or an oak tree.

30:14 Seth: Right, exactly. And so that's what's special. And that's the pre ontological understanding of being that he wants to interrogate. So what's happening in this passage is really, he's trying to say that this existential experience that Dasein has is something that's not shared by any other being.

30:38 Wes: You're spot on when you say, you know, like an electron. Can't say, you know, what is my identity? Should it.

30:44 Dylan: I wish I was a positron.

30:46 Wes: We, you know. Yeah. And you know, the contrast here is to nature, to physis. Right. Where things just become what they become according to their natural propensities. The oak tree becomes the oak tree. Wouldn't it be great if things were that simple for us? Unfortunately, we have to ask ourselves whether we're going to become a doctor, a lawyer or a philosopher or something else, we have to ask ourselves about all sorts of possibilities, about what we're going to do and who we're going to become. You know, this is very practical and even you could kind of write a self help book based on this. But that's the very practical level that Heidegger is on here. You know, we can worry about our futures and our possibilities. That's just the way we are constituted. And that is when we talk about that stuff, we are talking about ontology.

31:33 Seth: The Landmark Forum is a self help book, as it were, based on Heidegger.

31:38 Mark: So let me just read the one sentence, getting to where you were reading before, Wes, where it brings up this term existential, because I don't think we've really made that clear so far. Dasein always understands itself in terms of its existence, in terms of a possibility of itself, to be itself or not itself. That's what we've been talking about. Design has either chosen these possibilities itself or got itself into them, or grown up in them already. Only the particular Dasein decides its existence. Whether it does so by taking hold or by neglecting.

The question of existence never gets straightened out except through existing itself. The understanding of oneself which leads along this way we call existential question of existence is one of Dasein's ontical affairs. That's where you started. So existential is, you know, what this whole thing is about, what am I going to be? But then there are specific understanding that leads along the way existential. And that has to do with our ontic nature, not with our ontological nature. I'm still not sure I've put the

32:34 Wes: pieces together and we'll get the contrast in the next paragraph. But the existential and the ontic stuff, we're asking about particular properties of particular beings. Me or you wrestling with some question about who I am, what my role is. When we get to the existential again, we're getting into ontology, proper philosophical ontology, as opposed to my particular dilemmas. And we are getting into his variation on the Aristotelian or Kantian categories that he sets up for Dasein in particular, like facticity is one of them, or being in the world.

Those are quote unquote existentials, which is just to say his new ontological categories. So there's property level talk and there's category level talk. There's the same thing in Kant and the others as well. I can talk about whether something is red or a dog, ontic property level stuff, or I can talk about whether it has unity, whether it has causality. That's existential talk. That's category talk. So that's the distinction between existential and existential that he's making here.

33:46 Seth: There's an additional component here which this paragraph brings out really clearly, but which we'll also see when you get into the section on equipment. The whole being in the world thing, which is that phrase Dasein is this or that. Only the particular Dasein decides. When he's talking about Dasein, he's not talking about an individual, he's talking about the being that has this kind of being. So when he says Dasein's existence is determined by its awareness of its being, he's not talking about where an individual is coming to some kind of realization about their own experience.

That's what Wes was pointing out about the existential and the ontic. And later on, when he talks about equipment, referring to the entirety of the structure of use in the world, it's like you can't think about this like the individual human consciousness trying to come to terms and working through some kind of a. Of an experience. It's what is the kind of being that Dasein is, and what are the characteristics of that being. But if you start to talk about individual beings, that's when you drop into the ontic and the existential.

35:07 Mark: Yeah. So I think we should do a little more of this. So near the bottom of the page, the last sentence. Whenever an ontology takes for its theme entities whose character of being is other than that of Dasein. In other words, whenever we think of something that's not us, it has its foundation and motivation in Dasein's own ontical structure, in which a pre ontological understanding of being is comprised as a definite characteristic. Therefore, fundamental ontology, from which alone all other ontologies can take their rise, must be sought in the existential analytic of Dasein.

35:40 Wes: This is kind of an elaboration on the idea that we can figure out something about Dasein by looking at the question itself. Right. The question writ large are the sciences and the disciplines. So you want to say what is being? Well, Dasein has priority. When we're talking about questions of being, what is Dasein? Well, in particular, science is the sort of behavior that Dasein does, that sort of behavior that DA sign engages in. And so we can figure out a lot by looking at the inquisitive behavior of Dasein, let's say, okay, I

36:16 Dylan: was finding the behavior thing, but maybe you're talking about.

36:19 Wes: Yeah, that's probably Too sloppy a way of speaking.

36:21 Dylan: But you're talking about all three at the same time. All three of these priorities at the same time.

36:27 Wes: I mean, above, he's saying, right, the fundamental ontology. We need to do an existential analysis of Dasein. So we're not going to talk about unity and causality. We're not going to do all the stuff we do with non-Dasein things. We're going to start with. If we were mentalists, we would say, hey, this sounds a lot like he wants to analyze the mind and start with that, because we can't get to reality except through the mind. But of course, he's trying to put this in a much more neutral ontological language. So we do an existential analysis of the human being and we get such things as being in the world and equipment and all the rest of it.

37:03 Seth: But this particular section, let's just revert back to the. To the question we began with. If you were going to ask the question, what is being? If you were going to try to understand what the is in is is, the only way you could do that is by interrogating and investigating beings. So if you think that the beings that, for example, science is concerned with, the beings in the physical world, as it were, rocks, rocks, planets, trees, whatever will get you there, he says, nope, we've already told you, we've determined the being you want to interrogate with.

The kind of being that is going to get you to an understanding of being, capital B, is Dasein. And that's because Dasein is different from all of those other beings in that its being is a concern for itself, I. E. It has a sense of possibility, of there's something different about Dasein. This is just tying a bow on everything that's come before it. Which is to say, I don't think we should get too hung up on the notion of science, because what he's really trying to indicate here with the notion of science is the study of the world, of beings, as it were.

And he's just saying, like any, you know, like Hegel, like anybody else is, like, you got to start with the one that's doing the investigation. If you do science and you think science is showing something about being, you're ignoring the fact that there's a being that's doing the science.

38:33 Wes: Yeah, it's a good way of putting it.

38:35 Dylan: I agree. I like this paragraph a lot because he lays out these different levels, right? The ontical, the ontological and the ontico. Ontological, yeah.

38:45 Mark: Can you just read that last Paragraph that has those three things in there. And then we can wrap up part one here.

38:49 Dylan: Yeah. So design accordingly takes priority over all other entities in several ways. So this is what Seth's talking about is that it's sort of the entity of choice to be studying in order to understand being. The first priority is an ontical one. Dasein is an entity whose being has the determinant character of its existence. That's science part.

39:09 Mark: Right.

39:09 Dylan: It's a subject of a science inquiry.

39:11 Wes: This is the. Its essence is its existence. Its existence precedes essence. That's the ontic thing that's going on here. So you know, with other beings, if we want to say what it is and think about its essence, that the essence of other beings doesn't really reduced to mere existence. So there's something really interesting about Dasein in that sense.

39:32 Seth: Ontically speaking, Dasein has the experience of itself. Its determinate character is existence or existence. All other beings ontically have a determinate character. That's existentiell.

39:46 Wes: Let me just say this again. The whole conception of existence is associated with possibility and future possibility.

39:52 Seth: Yes.

39:52 Wes: And the fact that we can, you know, we're temporal and we can think about the future and that we're not just simply determined by. In the same way by some physis or nature or essence which is going to just make us who we are.

40:04 Seth: Correct.

40:04 Dylan: The only reason I said it was the science part, I agree with you is because this is a way in which Dasein has a priority. So it has an ontical priority in that its being is determinant of its character of existence. Its essence is in its existence. Right. And that's not true for other kinds of being. It's at the pinnacle of that.

40:26 Wes: What he's saying is our essence is to worry about shit. We are worriers. We think about the future. Who am I? What am I? Yeah, it's we and angst and yeah,

40:38 Seth: what Dylan's saying is that if you go investigate these other beings that don't have a determinate character even through their ontical existence, you'll miss this. That's why it's number one.

40:47 Dylan: The second priority is ontological. Dasein is in itself ontological because existence is thus determinative for it. So I kind of feel like the way we've just been talking about is blurring those two things, not separating those two things.

41:01 Wes: Well, Dasein is right. If we go back to the way in which Dasein is ontological. It's pre ontological in the sense that it has a know how relationship to the world. So we bump up against the world in our use, in our relationship to the world as equipment. So it possesses, in a manner constitutive of its understanding of existence, an understanding of the being of all beings, unlike itself. Anyway, I think this will get clearer later on.

41:31 Dylan: But that's the third one that's not ontological. That's ontico ontological.

41:35 Mark: Yeah, read the last sentence, Dylan, there. Yeah.

41:38 Dylan: But with equal primordiality, Dasein also possesses, as constitutive of its understanding of existence, an understanding of the being of all entities, of a character other than its own. Dasein has, therefore 2. For that's number 3.

41:53 Seth: It's number 3.

41:54 Dylan: It's number three.

41:55 Mark: Dasein has therefore, a third priority as.

41:58 Dylan: Therefore a third priority as providing the ontical ontological condition of the possibility of any ontologies. So the ontological is. Design is itself ontological because existence is thus determinative for it. And then there's the. But. But with equal primordiality, design also possesses an understanding of the being of all entities, of a character other than its own. That is its onto. Ontological priority.

42:22 Mark: Ontico dash, ontological. Just for people who can't see this,

42:26 Wes: the ontico ontological priorities has to do with its being the condition of the possibility of all ontologies.

42:34 Dylan: Yes, yes. That's what I.

42:36 Seth: That's what he just said.

42:37 Wes: The second priority is an ontological one. On the basis of its determination as existence, Dasein is in itself ontological.

42:46 Seth: Yes.

42:46 Mark: Can we say one more time, we just refresh for the confused listener what the three things are? I think we maybe have said that the ontical is clear enough. Right. It's what am I going to be the being whose entity? You know that this is what existentialism is all about in the pop sense of, you could be anybody, you could be anything. You have complete freedom. Sartre is going to interpret this as. But ontological is getting to actually. You got to know. You got to actually do philosophy.

43:14 Seth: Right?

43:14 Mark: The logical part, that means the study of, you know, so it's not just being whatever you want to be.

43:21 Wes: What I'm disputing.

43:22 Mark: Okay, so then what is the. How does that.

43:24 Wes: Because I think in this context, I don't think this is a big deal. I think in this context, he's thinking more about the preontological, where we are related to the world as equipment, per what he said above. But I admit it's confusing because he could have just said preontological here. But.

43:40 Seth: So priority number one, Dasein has a pre. Theoretical, pre ontological understanding of being.

43:49 Wes: I was saying that was the second one. Sorry, I like the way Mark put the first one. You know, it's just traditional existential stuff. Who am I?

43:58 Seth: No, no, no, no, no. If you look at what he's. Oh boy, is it worth getting wound up around.

44:03 Wes: I thought we all agreed about the ontic and the existential having to do with roll stuff. And who am I and what does my identity.

44:10 Seth: I was gonna try to clarify, but if it's already been clear clarified, then. So I don't think it's clear.

44:15 Mark: I don't think then the third one, at least the way I'm saying it, is that the first one is sort of of action and deciding. The second one is philosophy actually studying the third one, constitutive for the understanding of existence. You have an understanding of being of other. So it's. In other words, it's the relationship between the two. It's how we get from science, from studying individual things in the world, from trying to do Aristotle's categories, for instance, you know, by breaking down things to turning back to. Oh, that's the design's ontology. So he calls that the ontico ontological condition. Because it's like an individual thing that is.

44:52 Wes: Give your take, Seth, and then I'll tell you what I think about this.

44:56 Seth: All right, Condition one. Dasein has a pre theoretical, pre ontological understanding of being. That is what differentiates it from all the other beings. That differentiation comes at the ontical. It's just what is the nature of this thing. But then, because that very existence, that very pre theoretical is not simply it's determinative, it's what makes Dasein what it is and separates it from all the other beings. That's what makes possible the fact that you can even say that Dasein is ontological and not simply ontic. And then third, because it also possesses not just a pre theoretical understanding of being through its own, an understanding of its own being, this vague, indefined, it also has an understanding of entities other than itself.

Then what you have is the possibility of an ontic, which is to say the interrogation of the other beings, and an ontological, which is seeing from the perspective of Dasein as the interrogator that makes possible of interrogating the question of being, which is why you have to start with Dasein. But you can get elsewhere. Just like earlier when we were saying if you think that doing science and studying beings is going to get you to an understanding of being with a capital B, you're missing the fact that there's a being that's doing the interrogation, that's doing the inquiry.

Dasein and what he's saying here is if you combine all these aspects together, it's the Dasein that has a pre theoretical understanding or an understanding of being, being of itself. The fact that that is what determines it. Which is to say, which makes it legitimate for Dasein to have any kind of claim to being able to get to something deeper than just existentiality, deeper than just the lived experience. And then the fact that as the interrogator of all these other beings, because it has some sense of that this puts it all together.

47:04 Wes: So I like all that, but let me just. I'm not sure how we align because this is confusing and I admit I could be wrong. But we're asking the question why is it that we have to study human beings to get an ontology that's not the way things are necessarily traditionally done. Aristotle was thinking far more abstractly than that when he's thinking about unity and quality and quantity and all that stuff. So why in particular do we have to recast this in terms of Dasein categories? And there are three different senses in which he's trying to convince us we have to start with Dasein.

And why? Well, there's some very unique properties to the kinds of beings that are human beings. One of them is that their essence just is their existence in the sense that they're possibility oriented creatures. They're not simply determined by their essence. The second ontological one is just that this almost comes down to just being. 4. We are the types of beings that can be related to other beings in the world in this unique way we can be conscious of things. His way is this pre ontological. Our relationship is actually through use and equipment.

So that's his variation on consciousness. But it's just that we are beings for whom other beings can be. And then the third one, we're asking the questions and so we have to interrogate the question of the questioner in order to get where we want to go, right?

48:24 Mark: It's the connection between the two, right, ontico-ontological because we are questioning the ontic like that's what we've got to work with. Whether it's me as an individual thinking about myself, navel gazing, whether it's me doing some science. But we sort of get from that to the larger ontological question. Thus the we have ontico ontological priority. It's our way in.

48:46 Wes: We're special in. So Many ways.

48:47 Mark: All right, let's wrap up part one here. Part two will be up next week. If you are a Partially Examined Life supporter, you could get it right now. It'll be right there in your citizen feed. Thanks for being a supporter. Foreign.